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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Highways and Byways in London, by E. T. Cook
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Highways and Byways in London
+
+Author: E. T. Cook
+
+Illustrator: Hugh Thomson
+             F. L. Griggs
+
+Release Date: June 3, 2012 [EBook #39875]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN LONDON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Colin Bell, Christine P. Travers and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
+
+IN
+
+LONDON
+
+
+
+
+  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+
+  LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA . MADRAS
+  MELBOURNE
+
+  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+  NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
+  DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO
+
+  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
+
+  TORONTO
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Crossing at Piccadilly Circus._]
+
+
+
+
+  _HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
+
+  IN
+
+  LONDON_
+
+
+  BY MRS. E. T. COOK
+
+
+  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+
+  HUGH THOMSON AND
+
+  F. L. GRIGGS
+
+
+
+
+  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+  ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+  1920
+
+
+
+
+  _COPYRIGHT._
+  _First Edition_, 1902.
+  _Reprinted_, 1903, 1907, 1911, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+  HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS                                      1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+  THE RIVER                                               22
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+  RAMBLES IN THE CITY                                     53
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+  ST. PAUL'S AND ITS PRECINCTS                            84
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+  THE TOWER                                              100
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+  SOUTHWARK, OLD AND NEW                                 121
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+  THE INNS OF COURT                                      137
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+  THE EAST AND THE WEST                                  162
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+  WESTMINSTER                                            187
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+  KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA                                 210
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+  BLOOMSBURY                                             238
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+  THEATRICAL AND FOREIGN LONDON                          273
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+  LONDON SHOPS AND MARKETS                               298
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+  THE GALLERIES, MUSEUMS, AND COLLECTIONS                324
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+  HISTORIC HOUSES AND THEIR TENANTS                      358
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+  RUS IN URBE                                            385
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+  THE WAYS OF LONDONERS                                  414
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+  THE STONES OF LONDON                                   447
+
+
+  INDEX                                                  473
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  CROSSING AT PICCADILLY CIRCUS               _Frontispiece_
+
+  SANDWICH-BOARD MEN                                       6
+
+  THE SHOEBLACK                                           11
+
+  WHEN THE STRAND IS UP                                   16
+
+  WATERLOO BRIDGE                                         22
+
+  SIGHTSEERS                                              34
+
+  THE "TOP" SEASON                                        40
+
+  AN UNDERGROUND STATION                                  53
+
+  CLOTHFAIR                                               57
+
+  ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S, SMITHFIELD                           66
+
+  FIGHTING COCKS                                          85
+
+  ST. PAUL'S FROM THE RIVER                               87
+
+  ST. MICHAEL'S, PATERNOSTER ROYAL                        96
+
+  A BEEFEATER                                            102
+
+  CRICKET IN THE STREET. THE LOST BALL                   127
+
+  A COUNTY COURT                                         130
+
+  PEPYS AND HIS WIFE                                     140
+
+  LINCOLN'S INN                                          152
+
+  FETTER LANE                                            157
+
+  A RAILWAY BOOKSTALL                                    163
+
+  THE CITY TRAIN                                         165
+
+  BANK HOLIDAY                                           171
+
+  IN REGENT STREET                                       180
+
+  PICCADILLY                                             182
+
+  SPESHUL!                                               187
+
+  VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER                            206
+
+  ANGLERS IN THE PARKS                                   211
+
+  KENSINGTON PALACE AND THE ROUND POND                   214
+
+  EARL'S COURT                                           221
+
+  THE GERMAN BAND                                        239
+
+  THE PAVEMENT ARTIST                                    249
+
+  MUDIE'S                                                267
+
+  THE "GODS"                                             281
+
+  ICE-CREAM BARROW                                       291
+
+  THE ORGAN-GRINDER                                      293
+
+  A SALE AT CHRISTIE'S                                   298
+
+  THE DOG FANCIER!!!                                     304
+
+  IN THE CHARING CROSS ROAD                              306
+
+  SATURDAY NIGHT SHOPPING                                313
+
+  AN AERATED BREAD SHOP                                  321
+
+  A SKETCH IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE                           325
+
+  AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY                                   339
+
+  RECRUITING SERJEANTS BY THE NATIONAL GALLERY           345
+
+  AT THE CLUB                                            359
+
+  WYCH STREET                                            365
+
+  CRICKET IN THE PARKS                                   385
+
+  ROTTEN ROW                                             389
+
+  ROTTEN ROW                                             391
+
+  THE SERPENTINE, HYDE PARK                              393
+
+  TEA IN KENSINGTON GARDENS                              396
+
+  A FOUNTAIN IN ST. JAMES'S PARK                         398
+
+  THE REFORMER                                           403
+
+  A JURY                                                 414
+
+  'BUS DRIVER                                            415
+
+  INSIDE                                                 419
+
+  "BENK, BENK!!"                                         421
+
+  THE HANSOM                                             424
+
+  A DOORSTEP PARTY                                       428
+
+  HOP-SCOTCH                                             433
+
+  THE RETURN, BANK HOLIDAY                               435
+
+  FLOWER GIRLS                                           438
+
+  THE MEN IN BLUE                                        447
+
+  THE HORSE GUARDS                                       456
+
+
+
+
+"I confess that I never think of London, which I love, without
+thinking of that palace which David built for Bathsheba, sitting in
+hearing of one hundred streams,--streams of thought, of intelligence,
+of activity. One other thing about London impresses me beyond any
+other sound I have ever heard, and that is the low, unceasing roar one
+hears always in the air; it is not a mere accident, like a tempest or
+a cataract, but it is impressive, because it always indicates human
+will, and impulse, and conscious movement; and I confess that when I
+hear it I almost feel as if I were listening to the roaring loom of
+time."--_Lowell._
+
+
+
+
+HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
+
+IN
+
+LONDON
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
+
+  "London: that great sea whose ebb and flow
+   At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
+   Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more,
+   Yet in its depths what treasures!"--_Shelley._
+
+                       "Citizens of no mean city."
+
+
+The history of London is--as was that of Rome in ancient times--the
+history of the whole civilised world. For, the comparatively small
+area of earth on which our city is built has, for the last thousand
+years at least, been all-important in the story of nations. Its
+chronicles are already so vast that no ordinary library could hope to
+contain all of them. And what will the history of London be to the
+student, say, of the year 3000 A.D., when our present day politics,
+our feelings, our views, have been "rolled round," once more, in
+"earth's diurnal force," and assume, at last, their fair and true
+proportions?
+
+In "this northern island, sundered once from all the human race," has
+for centuries been lit one of the torches that have illumined
+humanity. Not even Imperial Rome shone with such a lustre; not even
+the Caesars in all their purple ruled over such a mighty, such an
+all-embracing empire.
+
+The history of this mighty empire is bound up with the history of
+London. For, the history of London is that of England; it was the
+river, our "Father Thames"--her first and most important highway, a
+"highway of the nations,"--that brought her from the beginning all her
+fame and all her glory. Partly by geographical position, partly by
+ever-increasing political freedom, and partly, no doubt, by the
+efforts of a dominant race, that glory has, through the centuries,
+been maintained and aggrandised.
+
+And why, some may ask, is London what it is? Why was this spot
+specially chosen as the capital? Surrounded by marshes in early Roman
+times, periodically inundated by its tidal river, densely wooded
+beyond its marshes, it can hardly have seemed, in the beginning, an
+ideal site. Why was not Winchester--so important in Roman times, and,
+later, the capital of Wessex--preferred? Why were not Southampton or
+Bristol--apparently equally well placed for trade--favoured? We cannot
+tell. The site may have been chosen by Roman London because it was the
+most convenient point for passing, and guarding, the ferry or bridge
+over the Thames, and for keeping up the direct communication between
+the more northerly cities of Britain, and Rome. Or, the nearer
+proximity to the large Continent, the better conditions for trade
+offered by the wide estuary of the Thames, possibly account for
+London's supremacy.
+
+The early Roman city on this time-honoured site, the poetically named
+"Augusta,"--that replaced the primitive British village--flourished
+greatly in the early days of the Christian era, and was large and
+populous; though the Romans did not consider it their capital, and
+never--we know not why--created it a "municipium," like Eboracum
+(York), or Verulamium. It was founded some time after the visit of
+Julius Caesar to Britain, B.C. 54, and it occupied a good deal of the
+area of the present _City_, extending, however, towards the east as
+far as the Tower, and bounded on the west by the present Newgate. The
+old Roman fort stood above the Wallbrook. Here in old days ran a
+stream of that name, long fouled, diverted, forgotten, and, like the
+Fleet River, only now remembered by the name given to its ancient
+haunt. The city of Augusta--or _Londinium_ as Tacitus calls it--has
+left us hardly a trace of its undoubted splendour. In London, ever
+living, relics of the past are hard to find. The lapse of centuries
+has deeply covered the old Roman city level, and what Roman remains
+exist are generally discovered, either in the muddy bed of the Thames,
+or at a depth of some twelve to nineteen feet below the present
+street. Of Roman London there is scarce a trace--a few meagre relics
+in Museums, a few ancient roots of names still existing, an old bath,
+traces of a crumbling wall, the fragment that we call "London Stone,"
+the locality of Leadenhall Market (undoubtedly an old "Forum"), and a
+portion of the old Roman Way of "Watling Street"--the ancient highway
+from London to Dover--running parallel with noisy Cannon Street.
+
+All this seems, perhaps, little when we think of the undoubted wealth
+and power of the old "Londinium," or "Augusta." But it has always been
+the city's fate to have its Past overgrown and stifled by the
+enthralling energy and life of its Present. It is as a hive that has
+never been emptied of its successive swarms. This is, more or less,
+the fate of all towns that "live." The Roman town was, of course,
+strongly walled, and the names of its gates have descended to us in
+the present "Ludgate," "Moorgate," "Billingsgate," "Aldgate,"
+&c.--names very familiar to us children of a later age--and now mainly
+associated with the more prosaic stations on the Underground Railway!
+Nevertheless, prosaic as they are, these stations commemorate the old
+localities. Roman London was at no time large in circumference,
+extending only from the Tower to Aldgate on one side, from the Thames
+to London Wall on the other. And when the Romans left, and the Saxons,
+after a brief interval, took their place, the city still did not grow
+much larger, nor did the blue-eyed and fair-haired invaders contribute
+much to the decaying fortifications; though it is said that King
+Alfred--he whose "millenary" we have recently commemorated--restored
+the walls and the city as a defence against the ravages of the Danes.
+Saxon London, however, which in its time flourished exceedingly, and
+existed for some 400 years, is, so far as we are concerned, more dead
+even than Roman London. Successive fire and ravage have obliterated
+all traces of it. Norman London, which after the Conquest replaced
+Saxon London, did not, apparently, differ greatly in externals from
+its predecessor. The churches were now mainly built of stone, but the
+picturesque houses were, as we know, despite successive destroying
+fires, still constructed of wood. From Norman London, we retain the
+"White Tower,"--that picturesque "keep" of London's ancient
+fortress--the crypt of Bow Church, and that of St. John's,
+Clerkenwell, with part of the churches of St. Bartholomew the Great,
+Smithfield, and St. Ethelburga, Bishopsgate. Little escaped the many
+great fires that in early times devastated the city.
+
+As for the ancient highways of London, very possibly these did not
+differ greatly in their course from our modern ones; for the
+Anglo-Saxon race has always been very conservative in rebuilding its
+new streets, regardless of symmetry or directness, on the lines of the
+destroyed ones. At any rate, we know that the original church of St.
+Paul's--the first of three built on this site, founded by Ethelbert
+about the year 610--and that of Westminster--altered, rebuilt, and
+enlarged by successive kings--must have early sanctified these spots,
+and necessitated thoroughfares between the two. Nay, even in Roman
+times, temples of Diana and Apollo are believed to have adorned these
+historic sites. It is strange, indeed, that the old, long-vanished
+Roman wall, pierced only by a few gates, and the ancient street-plans
+laid down by the Roman road surveyor, should still keep modern traffic
+more or less to the old lines. A few new streets have recently been
+made from north to south, but still the main traffic goes from east to
+west, owing to the paucity of intersecting thoroughfares. The city of
+London, as laid out in Roman times, remained, through Saxon and Norman
+dominion, practically of the same extent and plan as late as the time
+of Elizabeth, in whose reign there were as many houses within the city
+walls as without them. Roman influence is still dominant in modern
+London. The large block of ground without carriage-way about Austin
+Friars is a consequence of the old Roman wall having afforded no
+passage. And possibly many of the narrow, jostling City streets have
+in their day reflected the shade and sun of Roman "insulas," each with
+its surrounding shops, just as, later, their dimensions may have
+shrunk between the overhanging, high-gabled houses of Tudor times, to
+widen again under the tall Stuart palaces of the Restoration.
+
+[Illustration: _Sandwich-board Men._]
+
+The high antiquity and conservatism of London are shown in nothing
+more than in these narrow, crooked streets--streets so different from
+those of any other big metropolis--streets that our American cousins,
+in all the superiority of their regular "block" system, permit
+themselves to jeer at! We know, however, little for certain of the
+actual topography of London streets, until the important publication
+of Ralph Aggas's map in 1563, soon after Elizabeth had begun to reign.
+This map of "Civitas Londinium" is strange enough to look at in our
+own day. Its main arteries are the same as ours: the ancient highway
+of the Strand is still the Strand; those of "Chepe" and "Fleete" still
+flourish; Oxford Street, then the "Oxford Road" and "The Waye to
+Uxbridge," ran between hedgerows and pastures, in which, according to
+Aggas, grotesque beasts sported; the thoroughfare of the "Hay
+Market,"--not yet, indeed, "a scene of revelry by night,"--curves
+between vast meadows, in one of which a woman of gigantic size appears
+to be engaged in spreading clothes to dry; Piccadilly, at what is now
+the "Circus," is merely called "The Waye to Redinge," and is
+innocently bordered by trees. In these infantine beginnings of the now
+populous "West End," there are, indeed, occasional plots occupied by
+"Mewes," but St. Martin's Church (then a small chapel) stands
+literally "in the Fields," and St. Martin's Lane is altogether rural.
+In a later map--one of the year 1610--the main arteries are still the
+same; but, though the town had grown rapidly with the growth of
+commerce in Elizabeth's reign, "London" and "Westminster" are still
+represented as two small neighbouring towns surrounded by rural
+meadows; while "Totten-court" is a distant country village, Kensington
+and "Marybone" are secluded hamlets, Clerkenwell and "St. Gylles" are
+altogether divided from the parent city by fields, and "Chelsey" is in
+the wilds.
+
+It is strange that London fires--and London, in the middle ages, was
+specially prolific in fires--have never altered the course of the
+city's highways. Sir Christopher Wren wished, indeed, after the Great
+Fire of 1666, to be allowed to alter the plan of the desolated town
+and make it more symmetrically regular: with all due admiration of his
+genius, one cannot, however, help feeling a certain thankfulness that
+destiny averted his schemes, and that in the prosaic London of our own
+day we can still trace the splendour, the romance of its past. Thus,
+even in the grimy city "courts" we can still imagine a Roman
+"impluvium," or the ancient gardens of Plantagenet palaces; in the
+blind alleys of "Little Britain," the splendours of the merchants'
+mansions; in the ugly lines of mews and slums, the limits of the
+vanished Norman convent closes. The boundaries are still there, though
+nearly all else has gone. For, though Londoners are generally
+conservative with regard to their chief sites and the lines of their
+streets, they have, so far as their great buildings are concerned,
+always been by nature iconoclastic. Not that we of the present day
+need give ourselves any airs in this matter. Although, indeed, for the
+last half-century the spirit of antiquarian veneration has been
+abroad, yet the great majority of Londoners are hardly affected by it,
+and the pulling down of ancient buildings continues almost as gaily as
+ever at the present day. It may be said that we pull down for
+utilitarian reasons; well, so did our forefathers; Londoners have
+always been practical. Religious zeal may occasionally have served to
+whet their destructive powers, but the results are pretty much the
+same. Perhaps Henry VIII.--that Bluebeard head of the Church and
+State--has, in his general dissolution of the monasteries and
+alienation of their property, been the greatest iconoclast in English
+annals; yet even he must have been nearly equalled by the Lord
+Protector Cromwell, whose Puritanical train wrought so much havoc
+among London's monuments of a later age. Reforms and improvements, all
+through the world's history, have always been cruelly destructive.
+For, while churches and palaces were destroyed as relics of Popery,
+while works of art were demolished, and frescoes whitewashed in
+reforming zeal, fresh life was always sprouting, fresh energy ever
+filling up gaps, ever obliterating the traces of the past, the relics
+of the older time. Sir Walter Besant, in his picturesque and vivid
+sketch of English history, has realised well for us the city's past
+life:--
+
+     "It is (he says of the Reformation) at first hard to
+     understand how there should have been, even among the baser
+     sort, so little reverence for the past, so little regard for
+     art; that these treasure-houses of precious marbles and rare
+     carvings should have been rifled and destroyed without
+     raising so much as a murmur; nay, that the very buildings
+     themselves should have been pulled down without a
+     protest.... It seems to us impossible that the tombs of so
+     many worthies should have been destroyed without the
+     indignation of all who knew the story of the past.... Yet
+     ... it is unfortunately too true that there is not, at any
+     time or with any people, reverence for things venerable,
+     old, and historical, save with a few. The greater part are
+     careless of the past, unable to see or feel anything but the
+     present.... The parish churches were filled with ruins, ...
+     the past was gone.... The people lived among the ruins but
+     regarded them not, any more than the vigorous growth within
+     the court of a roofless Norman castle regards the donjon and
+     the walls. They did not inquire into the history of the
+     ruins; they did not want to preserve them; they took away
+     the stones and sold them for new buildings."
+
+Yet, though in London's history there were, as we have seen,
+occasional great upheavals, such as the Reformation, the Fires, the
+Protectorate, it was more the rule of change that went on unceasingly
+between whiles--change, such as we see it to-day, the incessant beat
+of the waves on the shore--that has obliterated the former time. "The
+old order changeth, giving place to new"; and strange indeed it is,
+when one comes to think of it, that anything at all should be left to
+show what has been. The monasteries, the priories, the churches, that
+once occupied the greater portion of the city, and filled it with the
+clanging of their bells, so that the city was never quiet--these, of
+course, had mainly to go. The Church had to make way for Commerce; the
+Monasteries for the Merchants. The London of the early Tudors was
+still more or less that of Chaucer, and contained the same Friars,
+Pardoners, and Priests. The paramount importance of the Church is
+shown by the old nursery legends that circle round Bow bells; and the
+picturesque figure of Whittington, the future Lord Mayor, listening,
+in rags and dust, to the cheering church bells that tell him to "turn
+again," is really the connecting link between the Old and the New Age.
+
+A few of the great monastic foundations of London escaped Henry
+VIII.'s acquisitive zeal, and have, as modern school-boys have reason
+to know, been devoted to educational and other charitable aims. It
+was, indeed, eminently suitable that in the classic precincts of the
+ruined monastery of the "Grey Friars" should arise a great school--the
+School of Christ's Hospital (colloquially termed the "Blue-Coat
+School")--where, till but the other day, the "young barbarians" might
+be seen at play behind their iron barriers, backed by the fine old
+whitely-gleaming, buttressed hall that faces Newgate Street. It was
+fitting, too, that the early dwelling of the English Carthusian
+monks--the place where Prior Houghton, with all the staunchness of his
+race, met death rather than cede to the tyrant one jot of his ancient
+right--should become not only a great educational foundation, but also
+a shelter for the aged and the poor. We know it as the "Charterhouse";
+as a picturesque, rambling building of sobered red-brick, built around
+many courtyards, its principal entrance under an archway that faces
+the quiet Charterhouse Square. The place has a monastic atmosphere
+still; to those, at least, who reverently tread its closes and
+byways--byways hallowed yet more by inevitable association with the
+sacred shade of Thomas Newcome; shadow of a shade, indeed! fiction
+stronger, and more enduring, than reality!
+
+Yet the Charterhouse is, so to speak, an "insula" by itself in London,
+a world of its own; possessing an ancient sanctity undisturbed by the
+neighbouring din of busy Smithfield, the unending bustle of the great
+city. More essentially of London is the curious unexpectedness of
+buildings, places, and associations. What is so strange to the
+inexperienced wanderer among London byways is the manner in which bits
+of ancient garden, fragments of old, forgotten churchyards, isolated
+towers of destroyed churches, deserted closes, courts and slums of
+wild dirt and no less wild picturesqueness, suddenly confront the
+pedestrian, recalling incongruous ideas, and historical associations
+puzzling in their very wealth of entangled detail. The "layers" left
+by succeeding eras are thinly divided; and the study of London's
+history is as difficult to the neophyte as that of the successive
+"layers" of the Roman Forum.
+
+[Illustration: _The Shoeblack._]
+
+It is sometimes refreshing to note that, even in the City and in our
+own utilitarian day, present beauty has not been altogether lost
+sight of. There is in modern London, as a French writer lately
+remarked, "no street without a church and a tree"; this is
+especially true of the City, where, even in crowded Cheapside, the
+big plane-tree of Wood Street still towers over its surrounding
+houses, hardly more than a stone's throw from the shadow cast by the
+white steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow, glimmering in ghostly grace above
+the busy street. So busy indeed is the street, that hardly a
+pedestrian stays to notice either church or tree; yet is there a
+more beautiful highway than this in all London? It is satisfactory
+to reflect--when one thinks of the accusation brought against us
+that we are "a nation of shopkeepers"--on what this one big
+plane-tree costs a year in mere lodging! Wandering northward from
+Cheapside down any of the crowded City lanes with their romantic
+names, through the mazes of drays and waggons--where porters shout
+over heavy bales, and pulleys hang from upper "shoots"--you may
+find, in a sudden turn, small oases of quiet green churchyard
+gardens--for some unexplained reason spared from the prevailing
+strenuosity of bricks and mortar--where wayfarers rest on
+comfortable seats, provided by metropolitan forethought, from daily
+toil. In these secluded haunts are many spots that will amply reward
+the sketcher. Specially charming in point of colour are the gardens
+of St. Giles, Cripplegate; these, though closed to the general
+public, are overlooked and traversed by quiet alleys, affording most
+welcome relief from the surrounding din of traffic. Here sunflowers
+and variegated creepers show out bravely in autumn against the
+blackened mass of the tall adjoining warehouses, whence a
+picturesque bastion of the old "London Wall" projects into the
+greenery, and the church of St. Giles, with its dignified square
+tower, dominates the whole. The author of _The Hand of Ethelberta_
+has, in that novel, paid graceful homage to the church and its
+surroundings. The little bit of vivid colour in the sunny churchyard
+(it is part rectory garden, and is divided by a public path since
+1878), affords a standing rebuke to the unbelievers who say gaily
+that "nothing will grow" in London. A delightful byway, indeed, is
+this parish church of Cripplegate! Its near neighbourhood shows, by
+the way, hardly a trace of the disastrous fire it so lately
+experienced. From the corner of the picturesque "Aerated Bread
+Shop"--of all places--that abuts on to the church, a delightful view
+of all this may be had. This ancient lath-and-plaster building will,
+no doubt, in time be compelled to give way to some abnormally
+hideous new construction, but at the present day it is all that
+could be wished; and, though so close to the hum of the great city,
+so quiet withal, that the visitor may, for the nonce, almost imagine
+himself in some sleepy country village. And thus it is in many
+unvisited nooks in the busy City. "The world forgetting, by the
+world forgot," is truer of these byways than of many more rural
+places. For the eddies of a big river are always quieter than the
+main stream of a small canal. In the world, yet not of it, are, too,
+these strangely old-fashioned rectories, sandwiched in between
+tall, overhanging city warehouses.
+
+But the sprinkling of old churches, with their odd, abbreviated
+churchyards, that are still to be found amid the busy life of the City
+of London, hardly does more than faintly recall that picturesque and
+poetic time when the church and the convent were pre-eminent. The
+great temporal power of the Church in London, that held sway during
+long centuries, is vanished, forgotten, supplanted as if it had never
+been. Do the very names of Blackfriars and Whitefriars suggest, for
+instance, to us, "the latest seed of time," anything more than the
+shrieking of railway terminuses, or the incessant din of printing
+machines? For, while the memory of the "Grey Friars" and that of the
+Carthusians is still honoured and kept green in the dignified
+"foundations" of Christ's Hospital and of the Charterhouse,--the
+orders of the "White" and "Black" Friars, of the Carmelites, and the
+stern Dominicans, have descended to baser and more worldly uses.
+Destroyed at the Reformation, its riches alienated, its glory
+departed, the splendid Abbey Church of the Dominicans came to be used
+as a storehouse for the "properties" of pageants; "strange fate," says
+Sir Walter Besant, "for the house of the Dominicans, those austere
+'upholders of doctrine.'" For the dwelling of the "Carmelites," or
+"White Friars," an Order of "Mendicants" these,--another destiny
+waited--a destiny for long lying unfolded in the bosom of our
+"wondrous mother-age." Mysterious irony of Fate! that where the
+Carmelite monks, in their Norman apse, prayed and laboured; where the
+Mendicant Friars wandered to and fro in the echoing cloister, the
+thunder of the printing-press should have made its home:
+
+  "There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
+   O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
+   There, where the long street roars, hath been
+   The stillness----"
+
+--The "_Daily Mail_ Young Man"--that smart product of a later
+age--has now his home in Carmelite Street; the "Whitefriars' Club" is
+a press club; the gigantic machines that print the world's news shake
+the foundations of St. Bride's; and the shabby hangers-on of Fleet
+Street--though of a truth, poor fellows, often near allied to
+mendicants--are yet, it is to be feared, only involuntarily of an
+ascetic turn. The contrast--or likeness--has served to awaken one of
+Carlyle's most thunderous passages: "A Preaching Friar,"--(he
+says),--"builds a pulpit, which he calls a newspaper:
+
+     "Look well" (he continues),--"thou seest everywhere a new
+     Clergy of the Mendicant Orders, some bare-footed, some
+     almost bare-backed, fashion itself into shape, and teach and
+     preach, zealously enough, for copper alms and the love of
+     God."
+
+Carlyle, apparently, nursed an old grudge against the press,--for this
+is not the only occasion when he fulminates against the new order of
+Mendicants. The theatres, also, that succeeded the monasteries of
+Blackfriars were, here too, supplanted by the Press; under
+Printing-House-Square only lately, an extension of the _Times_ Office
+brought to light substantial remains.
+
+But the Church was not the only mediaeval beautifier of London; as her
+temporal power and splendour waned,--the splendour of the merchants
+grew and flourished. For the great supplanter of the power of the
+Church was, as already hinted, the power of the City Companies. These
+immense trades-unions began to rise in the fourteenth century, when
+the old feudal system gave way to the civic community;--and they
+increased greatly in strength after the dissolution of the
+Monasteries. These companies incorporated each trade, and had supreme
+powers over wages, hours of labour, output, &c. In the beginning they
+were, like everything else, partly religious, each company or "guild"
+having its patron saint and its special place of worship;--the
+Merchant Taylors, for instance, being called the "Guild of St.
+John";--the Grocers, the "Guild of St. Anthony"; while St. Martin
+protected the saddlers, and so on. These guilds in time receiving
+Royal charters, became very rich and powerful, till the year 1363
+there were already thirty-two companies whose laws and regulations had
+been approved by the king. If any transgressed these laws, they were
+brought before the Mayor and Aldermen. We have still the Mayor and
+Aldermen, but the city companies (whose principal function was the
+apprenticing of youths to trades), have merely the shadow of their
+former authority, and their business is now mainly charitable,
+ceremonial, and culinary. Yet though their powers are diminished,
+their splendid "halls" are still among the most interesting "sights"
+of the City. Visits to these massive and solid palaces, some of them
+of great splendour, and rising like pearls among their often (it must
+be confessed) unsavoury surroundings, give a good idea of the immense
+wealth of those mediaeval merchant princes, and help the stranger to
+realize the strength of that power that was able to resist the
+attempts of kings to break its charter. Such sturdy independence, such
+insistence on her civic rights, has always been a main element of
+London's greatness.
+
+[Illustration: _When the Strand is up._]
+
+I have only touched at the mere abstract of London's voluminous
+history,--only enumerated a poor few of her Highways and Byways; the
+subject, in truth, is too great to exhaust even in a whole library
+of books. It is, indeed, the principal drawback to the study of
+London that she is too vast--that the student is ever in danger of
+"not seeing the forest for the trees." Her byways are as the sands
+of the sea in multitude; her history is the history of the world. It
+is, perhaps, better that the stranger to the metropolis should take
+in hand a small portion at a time,--and try to grasp that
+thoroughly,--than lose himself in an intricate maze of buildings and
+associations. To read the history of London aright,--to see and feel
+in London stones all that can be seen and felt, requires not only
+untiring energy, but also knowledge, sympathy, intuition,
+patriotism, one and all combined. To know London really well, one
+should gain an intimate acquaintance with her from day to day, not
+being contented with the common and well-known ways, but ever
+penetrating into fresh haunts. From all the great highways of
+London, from the Strand, Fleet Street, Piccadilly, Holborn, Oxford
+Street, convenient excursions may be made into the surrounding
+neighbourhood; which often, in different parts of London, is, so far
+as inhabitants, appearance, manners and customs go, really a
+complete and distinct city by itself. Does not "Little Britain"
+differ widely from its neighbouring Clerkenwell? Soho as widely from
+its adjacent Bloomsbury? and the immaculate Mayfair from the more
+doubtful Bayswater? Who does not recall what Disraeli--that born
+aristocrat in his tastes--said of the people who frequent the
+plebeian, though charming, Regent's Park?
+
+     "The Duke of St. James's," (he says),--"took his way to the
+     Regent's Park, a wild sequestered spot, whither he
+     invariably repaired when he did not wish to be noticed; for
+     the inhabitants of this pretty suburb are a distinct race,
+     and although their eyes are not unobserving, from their
+     inability to speak the language of London they are unable to
+     communicate their observations."
+
+So far from being merely one town, London is really a hundred townlets
+amalgamated. The visitor can there find everything that he wants; he
+must, however, know exactly what it is that he wants to find. Does he
+desire to see pictures? many galleries of priceless works of art are
+within a stone's throw, free, ready, waiting only to be seen; does he
+prefer realism and life? the "street markets" of Leather Lane and of
+Goodge Street are instinct with all possible types of humanity; does
+he yearn for peaceful solitude, historic association? the quiet nooks
+of the Temple invite him; is it solitary study that his soul craves?
+the immense library of the British Museum offers him all its
+treasures; does he merely wish to perambulate vaguely? even the
+prosaic Oxford Street presents a very kaleidoscope of human life.
+Nevertheless, in his perambulations, the wanderer should receive a
+word of warning: let him beware of asking for local information (save
+indeed, it be of a policeman), for two reasons. Firstly, because no
+born Londoner of the great middle class ever knows, except by the
+merest accident, anything whatever about his near neighbourhood; and,
+secondly, because if he do get an answer, he is morally certain to be
+misdirected. The wanderer should always start on his expeditions with
+a distinct plan in his own mind of the special itinerary he wishes to
+adopt,--be that itinerary Mr. Hare's, or any other man's,--and he
+should never allow himself to be drawn off from it to another tangent.
+Even this crowded highway of Oxford Street, "stony-hearted
+stepmother," old gallows-road, passing from Newgate Street to Tyburn
+Tree, and bearing so many different names in its course,--beginning,
+as "Holborn," in City stress and turmoil, intersecting the very centre
+of fashion at the Marble Arch, and continuing as the "Uxbridge Road,"
+to High Street, Notting Hill,--passes through all sorts and conditions
+of men and things. Tottenham Court Road, that glaring, fatiguing
+thoroughfare, which through all its phases ever "remains sordid,
+sunlight serving to reveal no fresh beauties in it, nor gaslight to
+glorify it," begins in comparative honour in New Oxford Street, to
+descend through bustle and racket to the noisy taverns and purlieus of
+the Euston Road. That sylvan village and manor of "Toten Court," where
+city folk repaired in old days for "cakes and creame," seems far
+enough away now! Fenchurch Street,--or rather its continuation Aldgate
+Street,--as it merges into the long "Whitechapel Road," becomes more
+and more dreary; not even its soft-gliding, cushioned tram-cars
+lending enchantment to the depressing scene. Waterloo Road and
+Blackfriars Road, "over the water," as they trend southwards pass
+through strange and often unsavoury purlieus. Every district has its
+special idiosyncrasies. Piccadilly and St. James's are always
+aristocratic. Pall Mall has a severe and solid dignity; while the
+Strand and its continuation, the narrow and tortuous Fleet Street, are
+instinct with ancient honour and literary association. Yet, even here,
+if the visitor have not the "seeing eye" that discerns the past
+through the present, he may "walk from Dan to Beersheba and find all
+barren."
+
+The great charm, however, of London lies in its unsuspected courts
+and byways. From most of these big thoroughfares you may be
+transported, with hardly more than a step, into picturesque nooks
+of sudden and almost startling silence, or, rather, cessation from
+din. All who know and love London will recall this. From busy
+Holborn to the aloofness of quiet Staple Inn, with its still,
+collegiate air, what a change from the turmoil of Fleet Street to
+the closes of little Clifford Inn, with its old-world, forgotten
+air. From High Street, Kensington, too, that town with all the air
+of a smart suburb, how many charming excursions may not be made on
+Campden Hill and in Holland Park--a neighbourhood full of artistic
+and literary charm. In Westminster, what quiet, secluded nooks, and
+green closes, abound for the sketcher, and how lovely are the
+gardens of the Green Park and St. James's Park, bordered by the
+stately palaces of St. James's, and the picturesque houses of Queen
+Anne's Gate. And all along the river embankment, from Westminster to
+the Tower, are interesting streets and nooks full of historic and
+literary association. The embankment, running, at first, parallel
+with the noisy Strand; reaching classic ground in the quiet Temple,
+by that garden where the "red and white rose" first started their
+bloody rivalry, becomes then muddy and uncared for before the
+newspaper land of Whitefriars; beyond, again, are blackened wharves,
+which gradually degenerate into the terrible and utterly
+indescribable fishiness of Billingsgate, and unpoetic Thames Street!
+Then, the "Surrey side" of the river,--Southwark and Chaucer's Inns,
+or what yet remains of them,--would form several delightful
+excursions; to say nothing of the Tower, with its innumerable
+historic associations,--and, perhaps, a visit to Greenwich in summer
+time. The old churches of the City would, as I have hinted, take
+many days to explore thoroughly; the Holborn and Strand Inns of
+Court and of Chancery, especially the Temple and Staple Inn, should
+be known and studied well; nothing can exceed the charm of these
+quiet and secluded "haunts of ancient peace."
+
+Space, however, is limited; I have now said enough to give some idea,
+even to the uninitiated, of London's many highways and byways, with
+their suggestions and associations. Yet one word of caution I would
+add: London must be approached with reverence; her cult is a growth of
+years, rather than a sudden acquisition. And the love of London
+stones, once acquired, never leaves the devotee. Whether he walk
+blissfully through Fleet Street with Johnson and Goldsmith, linger by
+the Temple fountain with Charles Lamb or Dickens, or traverse the
+glades of Kensington Gardens with Addison and Steele, "where'er he
+tread is haunted, holy ground." Here, on Tower Hill, once stood spikes
+supporting ghastly heads of so-called "traitors"; there, at
+Smithfield, were burned numberless martyrs. Even the London mud has
+its poetic associations. We may all tread the same road as that once
+trodden by Rossetti and Keats; strange road:
+
+  "Miring his outward steps who inly trode
+   The bright Castalian brink and Latmos' steep."
+
+Yes, the love of London grows on the constant Londoner. He will not be
+long happy away from the comforting hum of the busy streets, from the
+mighty pulse of the machine. In absence his heart will ever fondly
+turn to "streaming London's central roar," to the spot where, more
+than anywhere else, he may be at once the inheritor of all the ages.
+
+How interesting would it be if one could only--by the aid of some Mr.
+Wells's "Time Machine"--take a series of flying leaps backward into
+the abysm of time! Strange to imagine the experience! Beauty, one
+reflects, might be gained at nearly every step, at the expense, alas!
+of sanitary conditions, knowledge, and utility. Let us, for a moment,
+imagine how the thing would be.... First, in a few rapid revolutions
+of the wheel, would disappear the hideous criss-cross of electric
+wires overhead, the ugly tangle of suburban tram-lines, and the
+greater part of the hideous modern growth of suburbs.... Another whirl
+of the machine, and every sign of a railway station would disappear,
+every repulsive engine shed and siding vanish ... while the dull
+present-day rumble of the metropolis would give place to a more
+indescribably acute and agonising medley of sound.... Again a little
+while, and the hideous early Victorian buildings would disappear,
+making way for white Stuart facades, or sober red-brick Dutch
+palaces.... With yet a few more revolutions, the metropolis will
+shrink into inconceivably small dimensions, and the atmosphere of the
+city, losing its peculiar blue-grey mist, will gradually brighten and
+clear--a radiance, unknown to us children of a later day--diffusing
+itself over the glistening towers and domes, no longer blackened, but
+gleaming, Venetian-like, in the Tudor sunlight.... The aspect of the
+river too has changed; no more ugly steamers, but an array of princely
+barges deck its waters, gay with the bright dresses of ladies and
+gallants.... Its solid embankments have crumbled to picturesque
+overgrown mud banks, its many bridges shrunk to one; the little
+separate towns of "London" and "Westminster" presenting now more the
+appearance of rambling villages, adorned by some palaces and
+churches.... Another turn of the machine, and lo! the imposing facades
+that adorned the Strand have in their turn given way to picturesque
+rows and streets of overhanging gabled houses with blackened
+cross-beams, their quaint projecting windows almost meeting over the
+narrow streets ... stony streets with their crowds of noisy, jostling,
+foot-passengers.... Again a long pause ... and now the scene changes
+to Roman London, the ancient "Augusta," with its powerful walls, its
+slave ships and pinnaces, its mailed warriors, ever in arms against
+the blue-eyed Saxon marauders. Then--a final interval--and we see the
+primitive British village, its mud huts erected by the kindly shores
+of our "Father Thames," their smoke peacefully rising heavenwards
+above the surrounding marshes and forests.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Waterloo Bridge._]
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE RIVER
+
+     "Above the river in which the miserable perish and on which
+     the fortunate grow rich, runs the other tide whose flood
+     leads onto fortune, whose sources are in the sea empire, and
+     which debouches in the lands of the little island; above the
+     river of the painters and poets, winding through the downs
+     and meadows of the rarest of cultivated landscape out to the
+     reaches where the melancholy sea breeds its fogs and damp
+     east winds, is that of the merchant and politician, having
+     its springs in the uttermost parts of the earth, and pouring
+     out its golden tribute on the lands whence the other steals
+     its drift and ooze."--_W. J. Stillman._
+
+          "Above all rivers, thy river hath renowne....
+           O! towne of townes, patrone and not compare,
+           London, thou art the Flour of Cities all."--_Dunbar._
+
+
+No one, be he very Londoner indeed, has ever seen the great city
+aright, or in the true spirit, if he have not made the journey by
+river at least as far as from Chelsea to the Tower Bridge. From even
+such a commonplace standpoint as the essentially prosaic Charing Cross
+Railway Bridge some idea can be gained of the misty glory of this
+highway of the Nations. It is indeed, often one of these condemned
+approaches to London that give the traveller the best idea of the vast
+and multitudinous city. London railway approaches are often abused,
+even anathematized, yet surely nowhere is the curious picturesqueness
+of railways so proved as by the impressive approach to Charing Cross
+Station, across the mighty river. Here, at nightfall, all combines to
+aid the general effect; the mysterious darkness, the twinkling lights
+of the Embankment, reflected in the dancing waters, and cleansed by
+the white moonlight. What approach such as this can Paris offer? But,
+if the traveller be wise, he will soon seek to supplement such
+initiatory views by pilgrimages on his own account, pilgrimages
+undertaken in all reverence, up and down the stream. For, whatever Mr.
+Gladstone may have said of the omnibus as a mode of seeing London, may
+be reiterated more forcibly as regards the deck of a penny steamer. It
+is the fashion to call London ugly; Cobbett nicknamed it "the great
+wen"; Grant Allen has called it "a squalid village"; and Mme. de Stael
+"a province in brick." Yet, how full of dignity and beauty is the city
+through which this wide, turbid river rolls!--"the slow Thames," says
+a French writer, "always grey as a remembered reflection of wintry
+skies." Here, by day, hangs that veiling blue mist, which is the
+combined product of London fog and soot, adding all the indescribable
+charm of mystery to the scene; and, as twilight draws on, the grand
+old buildings loom up, vaguely dark, against the sky, their added
+blackness of soot giving a suggestion as of solidity and antiquity;
+that poetic time of twilight, "when," as Mr. Whistler puts it.
+
+     "The evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with
+     a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim
+     sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the
+     warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city
+     hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us."
+
+At night, the scene changes: the vast Embankment shines with lamps all
+a-glitter, and behind them the myriad and deceitful "lights of London"
+twinkle like a magician's enchanted palace.
+
+And it is altogether in the fitness of things that the river should be
+both introduction and entrance gate, so to speak, of modern London.
+For it is the river, it is our "Father Thames," indeed, that has made
+London what it is. In our childhood we used to learn in dull geography
+books, as inseparable addition to the name of any city, that it was
+"situated" on such-and-such a river; facts that we then saw little
+interest in committing to memory, but, nevertheless vastly important;
+how important, we see from this city of London. For London is, and
+was, primarily a seaport. In Sir Walter Besant's interesting pages may
+be read the story of the early settlers--Briton, Roman, Saxon,
+Norman--who successively founded their infant settlements on this
+marshy site, and had here their primitive wharves, quays, and trading
+ships for hides, cattle, and merchandise. It is the river, more than
+anything else, that recalls the past history of London. For London,
+ever increasing, ever rebuilt, has buried most of her eventful past in
+an oblivion far deeper than that of Herculaneum. Nothing destroys
+antiquity like energy; nothing blots out the old like the new. London,
+ever rising, like the phoenix, from her own ashes, has by the intense
+vitality of her "to-days" always obliterated her "yesterdays." It is
+only in dead or sleeping towns that the ashes of the past can be
+preserved in their integrity, and London has ever been intensely
+alive. Yet, gazing on the silvery flow of the river, we can imagine
+the Roman embankment, the hanging gardens, that once stretched from
+St. Paul's to the Tower; the Roman city, with its forums and
+basilicas, that once crowned prosaic Ludgate Hill--Roman pinnace,
+Briton coracle, Saxon ship, Tudor vessel--we can see them all in their
+turn--crowned by the spectacle of Queen Elizabeth in her gaily-hung
+state barge, with her royal procession; or, in more mournful key, her
+body, on its death-canopy--a barge "black as a funeral scarf from
+stern to stem," on that sad occasion when
+
+  "The Queen did come by water to Whitehall.
+   The oars at every stroke did teares let fall."
+
+If in the crowded day of London--with the shouting of bargees, the
+whistle of steam-tugs, and the puffing of the smoke-belching trains
+overhead, indulgence in such dreams is well-nigh impossible,--in the
+mysterious night, when the slow misty moon of London climbs, it is
+easy, even from an alcove of Waterloo Bridge, to indulge the fancies
+of
+
+  "That inward eye
+   Which is the bliss of solitude."
+
+The so-called "penny steamers" of London, which run, during the summer
+months, at very cheap rates between London Bridge and Chelsea, form
+the best way of seeing and appreciating the vast city. For those who
+do not mind rather close contact with "the masses"--braying
+accordions, jostling fish-porters, sticky little boys, and other
+inseparable adjuncts of a crowd whose "coats are corduroy and hands
+are shrimpy"--this mode of becoming acquainted with London will be
+found very satisfactory. The ways of the said steamers are often, it
+is true, somewhat erratic; yet if, on a warm June day, the stranger go
+down to the river in faith, his expectancy will generally be rewarded.
+Up comes the puffing, creaky little tug, making the tiny landing stage
+vibrate with the sudden shock of contact; there is an immediate rush
+to embark, and, on a fine day, you are, at first, happy if you get
+standing-room. Cruikshank's pictures, Dickens's sketches--how
+suggestive of these is the motley crowd of faces that line the
+boat,--faces on which the eternal "struggle for life" has printed
+lines, as it may be, of carking care, of blatant self-satisfaction, of
+crime and degradation. To quote William Blake, the poet-painter,--a
+Londoner, too, of the Londoners:
+
+  "I wander through each chartered street
+   Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
+   A mark in every face I meet,
+   Marks of weakness, marks of woe."
+
+The fine, broad Chelsea reach of the river, looking up towards Fulham
+from the Albert chain-bridge, is wonderfully picturesque. Here,
+especially on autumn nights, may be seen in all their splendour the
+brilliant sunsets that Turner loved to paint, and that, propped up on
+his pillow, he turned his dying eyes to see. The ancient and
+unassuming little riverside house where Turner spent his last days is
+still standing; but its tenure is uncertain, and it may soon vanish.
+It stands (as No. 119)--towards the western end of Cheyne Walk--the
+walk that begins in the east so magnificently, and decreases, as
+regards its mansions, in size and splendour as it approaches the old
+historic red-brick church of Chelsea. Yet, small as Turner's riverside
+abode is, it is more celebrated than any of its neighbours, for it was
+here that the greatest landscape painter of our time lived. Here,
+along the shores of the river, flooded at eve "with waves of dusky
+gold," the shabby old man with such wonderful gifts used to wander in
+search of the skies and effects he loved; here he was hailed by cheeky
+street arabs, as "Puggy Booth" (the legend of the neighbourhood being
+that he was a certain retired and broken-down old "Admiral Booth").
+Here he sat on the railed-in house-roof to see the sun rise over the
+river, and here, when too weak to move, his landlady used to wheel his
+chair towards the window that he might see the skies he so loved. "The
+Sun is God," were almost his last words. Thus, he who as a boy of
+Maiden Lane had spent his early years on the river near London
+Bridge--by the Pool of London, with its wharves and shipping--died,
+faithful to his early loves, in a small Chelsea riverside cottage. The
+row of irregular riverside houses, of which Turner's cottage is one,
+becomes more palatial lower down, across Oakley Street. In summer,
+what more lovely than the view from these houses, over the shining
+Chelsea reach, towards the feathery greenness of distant Battersea
+Park? a view which, even beyond the park limits, not even the
+too-conspicuous sky-signs or factory chimneys on the further shore can
+altogether abolish or destroy. So many things in London, ugly in
+themselves, are lent "a glory by their being far"; and even Messrs.
+Doulton's factory chimneys, seen through the blue-grey river mist,
+have, like St. Pancras Station, often the air of some gigantic
+fortress. This same blue-grey mist of London, especially near the
+river, is rarely ever entirely absent. Chemists may tell you that it
+is merely carbon, a product of the soot, but what does that matter? In
+its own place and way it is beautiful. The heresy has before now been
+ventured, that London would not be half so picturesque if it were
+cleaner; and from the river this fact is driven home more than ever to
+the lover of the beautiful. Blackened wharves, that through the dimmed
+light take on all the air of "magic casements,"--great bridges,
+invisible till close at hand, that loom down suddenly on the passing
+steamer with the roar of many feet, a rattle of many wheels, a rumble
+of many trains; vast Charing-Cross vaguely seen overhead--immense,
+grandiose, darkening all the stream; the Venetian-white tower of St.
+Magnus, gleaming all at once before blackened St. Paul's; and, most
+popular of all London views, the tall Clock Tower of the Houses of
+Parliament, with its long terraced wall, reflecting its shining lines
+in the broad waters. As ivy and creepers adorn a building, so does the
+respectable grime of ages clothe London stones as with a garment of
+beauty.
+
+The "respectable grime of ages" can hardly however be said yet to
+cover the newest Picture Gallery of London, glimmering ghostlike by
+the waterside, Sir Henry Tate's magnificent and splendidly housed
+gift, which rises whitely, like some Greek Temple of Victory, amid the
+dirty, dingy wharves, and generally slummy surroundings of the
+debatable ground that divides the river-frontages of Pimlico and
+Westminster. The changes of Time are curious. Here, where once stood
+Millbank Penitentiary, now rises a stately Palace adorned by pillars,
+porticoes and statues; wherein are enshrined some of the nation's most
+precious treasures, all the master-pieces of the modern school of
+English Art. Sir Henry Tate, a "merchant prince" of whom the country
+may well be proud, was a large sugar refiner, and we owe this imposing
+building, with a large part of its contents, to those uninspiring
+wooden boxes, so familiar to us for so many years back, labelled
+"Tate's Cube Sugar."
+
+The interior of the Tate Gallery (its proper denomination is, I
+believe, "the National Gallery of British Art,") is very delightfully
+planned. A pretty fountain fills the central hall of the gallery under
+the dome; an adornment as refreshing as it is unexpected. For London,
+the home of riches, is strangely niggardly with her fountains. Yet
+Rome, the city of fountains, had to bring all her water for many
+miles, and over endless aqueducts! The immediate riverside
+surroundings of the Tate Gallery are, as described, hardly grandiose;
+yet the timber-wharves and stone-cutters' sheds that here share the
+muddy banks with the ubiquitous tribe of London "Mudlarks," are not
+without their picturesque "bits." Old boats sometimes reach here their
+final uses; and even portions of old derelicts, like the "Temeraire,"
+often find their way here at last. Witness advertisements like the
+following:
+
+     FIRES.--Logs of old oak and ship timber, from Old Navy ships
+     broken up, in suitable sizes, for sitting-room use, so
+     famous for beautifully coloured flames, can only be obtained
+     from the ship breaking yard of ---- Baltic Wharf, Millbank,
+     S.W.
+
+It is, however, only the wharves and the mudlarks that are visible
+from the river itself; for the quaint gates of these timber-yards,
+opening on to the Grosvenor Road, and surmounted by their "signs" in
+the shape of ghostly white figure-heads--the figure-heads of real
+ships--are only visible to those who make their way along this
+mysterious region by land. These colossal creatures, indeed,
+projecting often far into the road, pull up the pedestrian with such
+alarming and human suddenness that it would surely require, in the
+uninitiated, a strong mind and a good conscience to travel this way
+alone on a dark night.
+
+The keynote of London is ever its close juxtaposition of splendour and
+misery, "velvet and rags." Therefore, after skirting the shore of
+Millbank, it strikes the Londoner as quite natural, and in the usual
+order of things, that he should suddenly and without any preface find
+his vessel gliding, in an abrupt hush, underneath the terrace-wall of
+the most well-known and most be-photographed edifice in London; under
+the high vertical wall, with its softly lapping waters, that guards
+the terrace of the Houses of Parliament. Classic retreat, where none
+but the specially bidden may enter! The great towers, with the vast
+building they surmount, darken, for a moment, all the stream by the
+intense shadow they cast, to mirror themselves anew in charming
+proportion as we descend the stream and they recede.
+
+Exactly opposite the Houses of Parliament are those curious
+seven-times-repeated red-brick projections of St. Thomas's Hospital,
+which are so prominent an object from the Terrace, that a fair
+American visitor, while taking her tea there, is said to have once
+innocently inquired: "Are those the mansions of your aristocracy?" Mr.
+Hare unkindly suggests that their chief ornament, a "row of hideous
+urns upon the parapet, seems waiting for the ashes of the patients
+inside."
+
+A little higher, on the Surrey side, is the historic Lambeth Palace,
+for nearly seven hundred years the residence of the Archbishops of
+Canterbury:
+
+  "Lambeth, envy of each band and gown,"
+
+says Pope truly. But the gifts of Fortune are, alas! seldom
+ungrudging; and, sad thought! by the time the poor Archbishops have
+reached the zenith of fame and comfort in their Lambeth paradise,
+their multifarious duties must effectually prevent their ever having
+time thoroughly to enjoy their "garden of peace." It is a lovely home,
+and commands perfect views. Quite Venetian-like, when night's canopy
+has fallen, do the lights of Westminster Palace appear from the
+Lambeth shore; the lighted Tower, which proclaims to all the world the
+fact that Parliament is sitting, reflected like a solitary full moon
+in the dark transparency of the waters. Lambeth Palace is, indeed, a
+charming spot, both for its views up and down the river and for its
+associations. In all its squareness of darkened red brick, it is very
+picturesque; the gateway with its Tudor arch, the chapel, and the
+so-called "Lollards' Tower," are, besides being historically
+interesting, fine subjects for an artist. At the gateway an ancient
+custom is observed:
+
+     "At this gate the _dole_ immemorially given to the poor by
+     the Archbishops of Canterbury is constantly distributed. It
+     consists of fifteen quartern loaves, nine stone of beef, and
+     five shillings' worth of half-pence, divided into three
+     equal portions, and distributed every Sunday, Tuesday, and
+     Thursday, among thirty poor parishioners of Lambeth; the
+     beef being made into broth and served in pitchers."
+
+In the Lollards' Tower are some curious relics of the barbarous
+tortures of the Middle Ages; and in the guard-room, or dining hall of
+the Palace, is a series of portraits of all the Archbishops from
+Cranmer to Benson. The modern and residential portion of the Palace,
+in the Tudor style, is contained in the inner court; it was rebuilt by
+Archbishop Howley in 1820. Howley was the last Archbishop who lived
+here in state and kept open house; "the grand hospitalities of Lambeth
+have perished," as Douglas Jerrold said, "but its charities live." The
+ancient portions of the palace have known many vicissitudes of
+fortune; Cranmer adorned his house, and loved to beautify his garden;
+Wat Tyler and his rebels plundered the palace and beheaded Sudbury,
+its then archbishop: and Laud, who had a hobby for stained glass,
+filled the chapel windows with beautiful specimens, which were all
+subsequently smashed by the Puritans. The palace, after having been
+used successively as a prison, a place of revel, and a garrison
+stronghold, now enjoys all the serenity of old age and quiet fortunes;
+its solid red brick, which time darkens so prettily, looking ever
+across the waters in calm dignity towards the taller stones of
+Westminster,--the spiritual contrasted with the temporal.
+
+The tower of the ancient church of St. Mary, Lambeth, close by the
+Palace, is memorable as the shelter of Queen Mary of Modena, James
+II.'s unfortunate wife, on the dramatic occasion of her flight from
+Whitehall with her infant son (the "Old" Pretender), on a wild
+December night of 1688:
+
+     "The party stole down the back stairs (of Whitehall), and
+     embarked in an open skiff. It was a miserable voyage. The
+     night was bleak; the rain fell; the wind roared; the water
+     was rough; at length the boat reached Lambeth; and the
+     fugitives landed near an inn, where a coach and horses were
+     in waiting. Some time elapsed before the horses could be
+     harnessed. Mary, afraid that her face might be known, would
+     not enter the house. She remained with her child, cowering
+     for shelter from the storm under the tower of Lambeth
+     Church, and distracted by terror whenever the ostler
+     approached her with his lantern. Two of her women attended
+     her, one who gave suck to the Prince, and one whose office
+     was to rock the cradle; but they could be of little use to
+     their mistress; for both were foreigners who could hardly
+     speak the English language, and who shuddered at the rigour
+     of the English climate. The only consolatory circumstance
+     was that the little boy was well, and uttered not a single
+     cry. At length the coach was ready. The fugitives reached
+     Gravesend safely, and embarked in the yacht which waited for
+     them."--_Macaulay._
+
+St. Mary's is the mother church of the manor and parish, and its tower
+dates from 1377:
+
+     "In this church is a curious 'Pedlar's Window,' with a
+     romantic story attached to it. When the church was founded,
+     it is said that a pedlar left an acre of land to the parish,
+     on condition that a picture of himself, his pack and his
+     dog, should be preserved in the church. This was accordingly
+     done; the pedlar was commemorated in the glass of the
+     window, and the value of the acre, at first 2_s._ 8_d._,
+     increased till in our day it is worth L1000 a year. In 1884,
+     some local iconoclasts actually removed the pedlar from the
+     window, to put up modern glass to the relatives of certain
+     officials. Popular indignation, however, has since
+     reinstated the injured pedlar, with his pack and dog, in
+     their place."
+
+But Lambeth, however charming and historic, is still "the Surrey
+Side", and the glories of the Albert Embankment pale before those of
+the Victoria Embankment, one of the greatest London improvements of
+the century. Of course it has its critics,--of the order who cavil at
+the poor Romans for embanking their devastating yellow Tiber. But it
+is the fashion for us to abuse our London monuments, and to deride
+them as the work of a "nation of shopkeepers." The Londoner rarely
+approves of anything new or even modern. Of the Chelsea Embankment,
+all that Mr. Hare says is that "it has robbed us of the water stairs
+to the Botanic Garden, given by Sir Hans Sloane." Does not even Mr.
+Ruskin fall foul of the innumerable straight lines of the Palace of
+Westminster, and of its stately Clock Tower, as testifying to the sad
+want of imagination shown by the modern English architect? (But Mr.
+Ruskin must surely that day have been in search for a windmill to tilt
+against, for the abused "straight lines" do not prevent this being one
+of the loveliest of London views.) And does not M. Taine pour the
+vials of his wrath on to the great river Palace of Somerset House,
+with its "blackened porticoes filled with soot"? "Poor Greek
+architecture," he adds compassionately, "what is it doing in such a
+climate?" Evidently the idea of the artistic value of soot, to which I
+have already alluded, had not occurred to him.
+
+The noble Victoria Embankment now runs where of old, in Elizabethan
+times, ran a glittering, almost Venetian, river-frontage of palaces.
+And where the old palaces stood in Tudor days, stand now enormous
+hotels--the palaces of our own day--each newer hotel in its turn
+eclipsing the other in size, magnificence, expense. The picturesque
+"Savoy," with its river balconies, the stately "Cecil," with its
+wonderful banqueting halls, and, further from the river, the spacious
+"Metropole," the "Grand," the "Victoria." All these hotels are so
+recent as to impress one fact upon us--the fact that London has really
+only lately become a tourist haunt. Statistics, indeed, show now that
+London attracts more visitors than any other great European town.
+Twenty-five years ago, it was as hard to find a good, clean, and
+thoroughly satisfactory London hotel, as it was to get a cup of tea
+for less than sixpence; or, indeed, a good one at all! But times have
+changed. Big hotels now, like flats, threaten to be overdone. We can
+well imagine the disappointment of the foreign visitor to London on
+discovering the names and uses of the fine buildings that adorn the
+river front between Westminster and Blackfriars. "What," he or she may
+ask, "is that imposing structure with Nuremberg-like green roofs,
+towering over the trees of the Embankment Gardens?" "That, Sir or
+Madam," answers politely the lady guide (for it is of course a
+charming and very certificated lady guide who "personally conducts"
+the party), "is Whitehall Court, a building let out in high class
+flats." "And what," continues the crushed tourist, "is that turreted,
+buttressed, red-brick edifice? Probably some rich nobleman's whim?"
+"Those, Madam, are the new buildings of Scotland Yard, recently
+designed by Mr. Norman Shaw, one of the most famous of our modern
+architects." "And what are those Venetian-like balconies, all hung
+with greenery and flowers?" "They belong, Madam, to the Savoy and
+Cecil Hotels. At the Savoy you may get a very nice dinner for a
+guinea; they have a wonderful chef; and in the enormous dining-hall of
+the Cecil, most of the great public banquets are given." "Truly, a
+nation of shopkeepers," the foreign visitor will re-echo sadly, as she
+dismisses her "lady guide."
+
+[Illustration: _Sightseers._]
+
+There is, I maintain, no finer walk in the world than that along the
+Victoria Embankment, from Blackfriars to Westminster. You may walk it
+every day of the year, and every day see some new, strange and
+beautiful effect of light, of water, of cloud. In midsummer, when the
+long row of plane trees offer a welcome shade and relief of greenery,
+and it is pleasant to watch the slow barges pass and repass; in
+autumn, when red and saffron sunsets flood all the west with light; in
+midwinter, when, sometimes, great blocks of ice line the turbid
+stream. One winter, not long past, when the Thames was all but frozen
+over, it was a curious and interesting sight to watch the crowd of
+sea-gulls, driven inshore by the intense cold, making their temporary
+home on the ice, and fed all day with raw meat and bread by thousands
+of sympathizing Londoners. Some of the birds had almost become tame
+when their compulsory visit came to an end.
+
+The river, in old pre-embankment days, flowed at the foot of the
+curious ancient stone archway called "York Stairs," that stranded
+water-gate of old York House, which stands, lonely and neglected, in a
+corner of the Embankment Gardens. It has, however, survived, and that,
+in London, is always something. Its long buried, and now excavated,
+columns show the ancient level of the river, and the height to which
+the present Embankment has been raised. The Palace of York House, to
+which it was the river-gate, has gone the way of all palaces; its
+ruins (as all ruins must ever be in London), are thickly built over.
+Indeed, Somerset House is almost the only palace left to tell of the
+ancient river-side glories, glories of which Herrick wrote:
+
+  "I send, I send, here my supremest kiss
+   To thee, my silver-footed Tamasis,
+   No more shall I re-iterate thy strand
+   Whereon so many goodly structures stand."
+
+Even Somerset House is merely an old palace rebuilt, for the present
+edifice is not much more than a century old. Buildings in London tend
+to become utilitarian; and Royalty, besides, has deserted the City for
+the West End. So the ancient Palace of the Lord Protector Somerset,
+that Palace that he destroyed so much to build, spent such vast sums
+on, and yet never lived in, but had his head cut off instead; the
+Palace that used to be the residence of the wives of the Stuart Kings,
+as described by Pepys, is now superseded by the vast Inland Revenue
+Office, with its myriad suites, corridors, chambers. Truly, a change
+typical of our busy and practical era!
+
+Somerset House occupies the site of the older palace, a site almost
+equal in area to Russell Square. But the older palace, as befitted the
+"Dower House" of the Queens of England had gardens that extended along
+the river-shore. It was in Old Somerset House that Charles II.'s poor
+neglected Queen, Catherine of Braganza, used to sit all night playing
+at "ombre," a game which she had herself imported from Portugal; and
+it was here, in 1685, that three of her household were charged with
+decoying Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey into the precincts of the palace, and
+there strangling him. The wide courtyard of the interior has a bronze
+allegorical group by _Bacon_, of George III. mixed up with "Father
+Thames." Queen Charlotte, apparently rather resenting the ugliness of
+the representation, said to the sculptor, "Why did you make so
+frightful a figure?" The artist was ready with his reply. "Art," he
+said, bowing, "cannot always effect what is ever within the reach of
+Nature--the union of beauty and majesty." I myself must confess to
+some sympathy with Queen Charlotte; but the art of her day had ever a
+tendency to efflorescent excrescence.
+
+On the river's very brink, a little higher up than Somerset House and
+its adjacent hotels, Cleopatra's Needle, that "great rose-marble
+monolith," stands guarded by two bronze sphinxes on a pediment of
+steps, backed by the Embankment and the trees of its gardens. The
+monolith is here in strange and novel surroundings. What ruins of
+empires and dynasties has not this ancient Egyptian obelisk seen! We
+poor human beings soon live out our little day, and are gone:
+
+  "The Eternal Saki from the Bowl hath poured
+   Millions of bubbles like us, and will pour----"
+
+while this senseless block of stone lives for ever, regardless of the
+tides of humanity that ebb and flow ceaselessly about its feet. Has it
+not been a "silent witness" of the pageants of the magnificent
+Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty? Its hieroglyphics record its
+erection by Thotmes III., before the Temple of the Sun in _On_
+(Heliopolis), where it remained for the first 1600 years of its
+existence, and (says Mr. Hare) witnessed the slavery and imprisonment
+of the patriarch Joseph. The obelisk has had a strange and eventful
+history. Removed to Alexandria shortly before the Christian era, it
+was never erected there, but lay for years prone in the sand. Then, in
+1820, Mahomet Ali presented it to the British nation; with, however,
+no immediate result. For, the difficulties of removal being great, no
+advantage was taken of the offer, till, in 1877, Mr. (afterwards Sir)
+Erasmus Wilson gave the necessary funds, amounting to L10,000. A
+special cylinder boat was made for the obelisk, but even with its
+removal its adventures were not ended, for, in the Bay of Biscay, the
+vessel encountered a terrific storm, and the crew of the ship that
+towed it, in peril of their lives, cut it adrift. For days it was
+lost, till a passing steamer happened to sight the strange-looking
+object and picked it up, earning salvage on it.
+
+The granite is said to be slowly disintegrating and the hieroglyphics
+therefore becoming less deeply scored, by the action of the London
+smoke and mist--the mist glorified poetically by Mr. Andrew Lang in
+his "Ballade of Cleopatra's Needle";
+
+  "Ye giant shades of Ra and Tum,
+   Ye ghosts of gods Egyptian,
+   If murmurs of our planet come
+   To exiles in the precincts wan
+   Where, fetish or Olympian,
+   To help or harm no more ye list,
+   Look down, if look ye may, and scan
+   This monument in London mist!
+
+  "Behold, the hieroglyphs are dumb,
+   That once were read of him that ran
+   When seistron, cymbal, trump, and drum,
+   Wild music of the Bull began;
+   When through the chanting priestly clan
+   Walk'd Ramses, and the high sun kiss'd
+   This stone, with blessing scored and ban--
+   This monument in London mist.
+
+  "The stone endures though gods be numb;
+   Though human effort, plot, and plan
+   Be sifted, drifted, like the sum
+   Of sands in wastes Arabian.
+   What king may deem him more than man,
+   What priest says Faith can Time resist
+   While _this_ endures to mark their span--
+   This monument in London mist?"--
+
+It has been objected that Cleopatra's needle ought to have been placed
+somewhere else; for instance, in the centre of the Tilt Yard, opposite
+the Horse Guards. But it is, as I said, typical of Londoners to find
+fault with their monuments; and it is difficult to agree with the
+writer who described it as in its present position "adorning nothing,
+emphasising nothing, and by nothing emphasised." M. Gabriel Mourey,
+for instance, who, though a Frenchman, is also a lover of London,
+brings it very charmingly into his "impression" of the scene from
+Charing-Cross Bridge:
+
+     "I go every morning to Charing-Cross Bridge, to gaze on the
+     'magical effects' produced by fog and mist on the Thames.
+     The buildings on the shores have vanished; there, where
+     recently seethed an enormous conglomeration of roofs,
+     chimneys, the perpetual encroachment of interminable
+     facades, all that insentient life of stones,--heaped to
+     lodge human toil, suffering, happiness,--seems to be now
+     only a desert of far-reaching waters. The river has
+     immeasurably widened, has extended its shores to the
+     infinite. Such immensity is terrible ... the atmosphere is
+     heavy; there is a conscious weight around, above, a weight
+     that presses down, penetrates into ears and mouth, seems
+     even to hang about the hair. We might, indeed, be existing
+     in a kind of nothingness, except for the perpetual passage
+     of trains--trains that shake the floor of the bridge, and
+     jar our whole being with metallic vibrations.... The wooden
+     sheds of the landing-stage, backed by the stone steps and
+     parapet,--with, further on, the thin spire of Cleopatra's
+     Needle, an unimagined network of lines,--appear suddenly out
+     of nothingness; it might be a fairy city rising all at once;
+     here are revealed the gigantic buildings of the Savoy Hotel,
+     and yonder, farther on, those of Somerset House, as the fog
+     gradually lifts; the whole effect is suggestive of a
+     negative under the chemical action of the developer. There
+     is, however, no distinctness; the negative is a fogged one;
+     outlines are only distinguished with difficulty; and
+     everything, in this strange and sad monochrome, seems to
+     acquire a vast and altogether fantastic size. The sky,
+     however, moves; thick, ragged clouds unravel themselves, in
+     colour a dirty yellow fringed with white; they might well be
+     great folds of torn curtains entangled in each other,
+     curtains of dingy wadding, thickly lined, and edged with
+     faint gold. But the light is too feeble to reflect itself,
+     and the water below continues to flow dully, as though
+     weighed down with the burden of that heavy sky; the
+     pleasure-steamers, indeed, seem to cleave it with painful
+     toil, to force a pathway, soon again closed; a pathway of
+     which scarcely a trace remains, only a slow, sluggish
+     undulation, soon lost in the general distracting cohesion of
+     all and everything."
+
+It may be interesting here to recall Lord Tennyson's sonnet, and the
+story told of it by his son:
+
+     "When Cleopatra's Needle was brought to London, Stanley
+     asked my father to make some lines upon it; to be engraven
+     on the base. These were put together by my father at once,
+     and I made a note of them:
+
+                  _Cleopatra's Needle._
+
+          "Here, I that stood in On beside the flow
+           Of sacred Nile, three thousand years ago!--
+           A Pharaoh, kingliest of his kingly race,
+           First shaped, and carved, and set me in my place.
+           A Caesar of a punier dynasty
+           Thence haled me toward the Mediterranean sea,
+           Whence your own citizens, for their own renown,
+           Thro' strange seas drew me to your monster town.
+           I have seen the four great empires disappear!
+           I was when London was not! I am here!"
+
+[Illustration: _The "Top" Season._]
+
+Waterloo Bridge, crossing the Thames at Somerset House, was built by
+Rennie in 1817. Canova considered it "the noblest bridge in the world,
+and worth a visit from the remotest corners of the earth." It was at
+first intended to call it the "Strand" Bridge; but it was eventually
+named "Waterloo," in honour of the victory just won. Yet Waterloo
+Bridge is not without its dismal associations. So many people, for
+instance, have committed suicide from it, that it has been called the
+"English Bridge of Sighs." It suggests Hood's ballad of the
+"Unfortunate":
+
+  "The bleak wind of March
+   Made her tremble and shiver:
+   But not the dark arch
+   Or the black flowing river."
+
+Waterloo Bridge has indeed been the last resource of many an unhappy
+human moth--attracted by "the cruel lights of London"--to whom
+
+  "When life hangs heavy, death remains the door
+   To endless rest beside the Stygian shore."
+
+Dante Rossetti, who painted his terrible picture of the lost girl
+found by her old lover on a London bridge at dawning, has well
+realised the ineffable sadness of the wrecks made by this whirlpool of
+London.
+
+The Victoria Embankment, and indirectly also this splendid Waterloo
+Bridge, have given cause for one of the most eloquent diatribes of our
+greatest aesthetic critic. Mr. Ruskin, though he cannot but admire the
+vast curve of Waterloo Bridge, where the Embankment road passes under
+it, "as vast, it alone, as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less
+seemly in proportions," yet finds, in the wretched attempts at
+decoration on the Embankment, and in the sad want of "human
+imagination" of the English architect, windmills apt and ready to his
+lance. Unlike the Rialto, the "Waterloo arch," he remarks plaintively,
+"is nothing more than a gloomy and hollow heap of wedged blocks of
+blind granite":
+
+     "We have lately been busy," he says, "embanking, in the
+     capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters,
+     the imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and
+     the bounty of nature most useful. Of all architectural
+     features of the metropolis, that embankment will be, in
+     future, the most conspicuous; and in its position and
+     purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment. For that
+     adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern
+     poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of
+     gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our
+     minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that
+     the gas should come out of fishes' tails; but we have not
+     ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for
+     ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble,
+     which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops
+     in every capital in Europe for the last fifty years. We cast
+     _that_ badly, and give lustre to the ill-cast fish with
+     lacquer in imitation of bronze. On the base of their
+     pedestals, toward the road, we put, for advertisement's
+     sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther
+     originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of
+     Mercury: and to adorn the front of the pedestals towards the
+     river, being now wholly at our wits' end, we can think of
+     nothing better than to borrow the door-knocker which--again
+     for the last fifty years--has disturbed and decorated two or
+     three millions of London street doors; and magnifying the
+     marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its
+     mouth (still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the
+     embankment with a row of heads and rings, on a scale which
+     enables them to produce, at the distance at which only they
+     can be seen, the exact effect of a row of sentry-boxes."
+
+Much, however, may be forgiven to Mr. Ruskin. On the other hand, the
+view from Waterloo Bridge is thus described by the late Mr. Samuel
+Butler:
+
+     "When ... I think of Waterloo Bridge and the huge
+     wide-opened jaws of those two Behemoths, the Cannon Street
+     and Charing Cross railway stations, I am not sure that the
+     prospect here is not even finer than in Fleet Street. See
+     how they belch forth puffing trains as the breath of their
+     nostrils, gorging and disgorging incessantly those human
+     atoms whose movement is the life of the city. How like it
+     all is to some great bodily mechanism.... And then ... the
+     ineffable St. Paul's. I was once on Waterloo Bridge after a
+     heavy thunderstorm in summer. A thick darkness was upon the
+     river and the buildings upon the north side, but just below,
+     I could see the water hurrying onward as in an abyss, dark,
+     gloomy and mysterious. On a level with the eye there was an
+     absolute blank, but above, the sky was clear, and out of the
+     gloom the dome and towers of St. Paul's rose up sharply,
+     looking higher than they actually were, and as though they
+     rested upon space."
+
+Mr. Astor's charming estate office, one of the prettiest buildings in
+London, facing the Embankment, close to the Temple Gardens, is yet
+another instance of that latter-day change from palace to office,
+already mentioned. At Blackfriars, the Victoria Embankment ends, and
+tall, many-storied warehouses crowd down to the water's edge, in
+picturesque though dingy medley, with, behind them, the blackened dome
+of St. Paul's, attended by its sentinel spires,--St. Paul's, that has
+nearly all the way stood out prominently in the distance, making this,
+by universal consent, the finest view in all London. The noble effect
+of Wren's great work is indeed, apparent from all points; but it is
+the river and the wharves that, no doubt, form its best and most
+fitting foreground. As we near London Bridge, the dirt of the vast
+highway gains upon us; but, it must be confessed, its general
+picturesqueness is thereby immeasurably increased. Dirt, after all, is
+always so near akin to picturesqueness. The mud-banks and the mud
+become more constant, the bustle and hum of the great city are
+everywhere evident. Barges are moored under the tall warehouses;
+workmen stand in the storing-places above, hauling up the goods from
+the boats with ropes and pulleys; it is a scene of ceaseless activity,
+an activity too, which increases as you descend the stream. On the one
+side, the slums and warehouses of Upper Thames Street; on the other,
+the yet slummier purlieus of busy, often-burned-down Tooley Street.
+Thames Street, like its adjoining Billingsgate, is, I may remark,
+nearly always muddy, whatever the time of year. On rainy days, it is
+like a Slough of Despond. If by chance you wish to land at All Hallows
+or London Bridge Piers, you must first climb endless wooden and
+slippery steps, then wend your way carefully, past threatening cranes,
+and along narrow alleys between high houses, alleys blocked by heavy
+waggons, from which tremendous packages ascend, by rope, to top
+stories; alleys where there is barely room for a solitary pedestrian
+to wedge himself past the obstruction. Barrels of the delicious
+oyster, the obnoxious "cockle," the humble "winkle"; loud scents that
+suggest the immediate neighbourhood of the ubiquitous "kipper"; these,
+mingled with the shouts of fish-wives and porters, greet you near that
+Temple of the Fisheries, Billingsgate. The enormous Monument, which
+stands close by, may be said to be in the dirtiest, dingiest portion
+of this dingy region. "Fish Street Hill" the locality is called; and
+it certainly is no misnomer.
+
+London Bridge must have been wonderfully picturesque in old days; it
+seems to have looked then very much as the Florentine "Ponte Vecchio"
+does now, with, outside, its quaint overhanging timbered houses,
+balconies, roof-gardens, and, inside, its narrow street of shops. The
+sixth picture in the "Marriage a la Mode" series at the National
+Gallery gives us an idea of what it was like. The present bridge,
+opened in 1831, at a cost of two millions, is the last of many on or
+near this site. For there has been a bridge here of some kind ever
+since we know anything of London; no other bridge, indeed, existed at
+all in old days. By old London Bridge Wat Tyler entered with his
+rebels; by it Jack Cade invaded the city (though his head, for that
+matter, soon adorned its gate-house), and here London was wont, with
+pageant and ceremonial, to welcome her kings. The picturesque old
+stone bridge was demolished in 1832; its narrow arches hindered
+traffic, and gave undue help, besides, to that total freezing of the
+river that occasionally happened, as the ancient "Frost Fairs" record,
+in old days; yet one cannot help regretting the necessity for its
+removal. The present London Bridge, though said to be "unrivalled in
+the world in the perfection of proportion and the true greatness of
+simplicity," is, perhaps, more practical than aesthetically beautiful.
+The tide ebbs strongly against its massive piers; the last roadway
+across the river, it is also the boundary line for big ships and
+sailing boats; below here the river assumes more and more the look of
+a sea-port; it becomes "the Pool of London." From this bridge are to
+be seen some of the finest London views. The lace-like structure of
+the unique Tower Bridge, the most extraordinary monument of the
+century, rising, between its huge watch-towers, like a white wraith
+behind the more prosaic stone of London Bridge, is here very telling.
+And, looking towards the City, the brilliant tower of St. Magnus
+gleams with quite Venetian-like brightness against the blackened
+medley of its background.
+
+The Tower Bridge, on a first sight, is infinitely more astonishing to
+the sightseer than any other London monument. It has also a mediaeval
+look, as of some gigantic fortress of the sixteenth century. With
+regard to the two great towers, flanked on either side by their
+graceful suspension chains, "spanned high overhead as with a lintel,
+and holding apart the great twin bascules, like a portcullis raised to
+give entry to a castle, there is no denying that all this must loom as
+an impressive watergate upon ships coming from overseas to the Port of
+London." M. Gabriel Mourey thus describes it:
+
+     "The Tower Bridge, the water-gate of the Capital, is a
+     colossal symbol of the British genius. Like that genius, the
+     Bridge struck me as built on lines of severe simplicity,
+     harmonious, superbly balanced, without exaggeration or
+     emphasis; sober architecture, yet with reasonable
+     audacities, signifying its end with that clearness which is
+     the hall-mark of everything English. It wonderfully
+     completes the seething landscape of quays and docks, and the
+     infernal activity of the greatest port in the world. No
+     waters in the world better reflect without deforming than
+     the muddy waters of the Thames; never blue even under the
+     blue skies of summer. Throw this bridge across the Seine or
+     the Loire, and it would spoil the view, like a false note of
+     colour. But here, on the contrary, its effect is
+     prodigiously imposing. Look at its two towers, how square
+     and solid they are. Their tips are crowned by steeples, the
+     roofs are pointed, the windows straight, with pointed
+     arches. It looks like the gate to some strong tower of the
+     middle ages. The combinations of lines composing the bridge
+     call up the idea of some heroic past time. They lift
+     themselves above the river like some massive efflorescence
+     of the past. But look again, and the impression becomes more
+     complex. Light and airy, like clear lace, an iron
+     foot-bridge joins the two towers, across the abyss. Another,
+     lower down, on the level of the banks, lifts up to let big
+     ships pass as under a triumphal arch. And all the audacity
+     of the modern architects, which is to create the works of
+     the future, here bursts forth, suspended on the heavy
+     foundations of the past; with so much measure and proportion
+     that nothing offends in the medly of archaism and modernity.
+     There are few countries able to carry off such contrasts.
+     But this country adjusts itself to them in perfection. It is
+     because no other people know how to unite with the same
+     harmonious force the cult of the past, the religion of
+     tradition, to an unchecked love of progress, and a lively
+     and insatiable passion for the future."
+
+The Tower Bridge, as compared with other great engineering works of
+the kind, labours under the disadvantage of not being seen properly
+from anywhere as a whole, taking in, that is, both abutment towers
+with their pendant suspension chains, which add so much to the general
+effect. Nevertheless, even viewed from close by, it is very telling,
+and dwarfs immeasurably any other building near it; see, for instance,
+how the little Tower of London, that ancient and most historic
+fortress, loses its size from its close juxtaposition to those
+supporting towers! The "bascules," or drawbridges, are worked by
+hydraulic power, and it is a curious and interesting sight to see them
+raised to allow tall vessels to pass. Below the Tower Bridge, the
+broad river seems to extend in a sea of masts, the city to become a
+world of wharves and docks. To quote, once more, an "impression" of M.
+Gabriel Mourey:
+
+     "Once past the London Tower Bridge, and its two enormous
+     towers, which rise like a triumphal arch with an air of calm
+     victory at the entrance to the great metropolis, the seaport
+     aspect of London becomes very apparent. The immense traffic
+     on the river is evident from the constant passage of
+     steamers, no less than by their frequent calls at the
+     wharves whose blackened walls, deep in water, receive the
+     riches of the entire world. A whole people toil at the
+     unloading of the enormous ships; swarming on the barges,
+     dark figures, dimly outlined, moving rhythmically, fill in
+     and give life to the picture. In the far distance, behind
+     the interminable lines of sheds and warehouses, masts bound
+     the horizon, masts like a bare forest in winter, finely
+     branched, exaggerated, aerial trees grown in all the
+     climates of the globe. Steam-tugs whistle, pant, and hurry;
+     ships with great red sails descend the river towards the
+     sea. An enormous steamer advances majestically; she seems as
+     tall as a five-storied house and her masts are lost in the
+     mist. The river suddenly widens, the thick smoke of the
+     atmosphere almost prevents one from seeing the other side;
+     it might almost be an immense lake. Rain, steam, and
+     speed;--Turner's chef d'oeuvre evoked before my eyes. The
+     ever-changing sky is a continual wonder. A while ago the
+     sun, like a disc of melting cream, disappeared in yellowish
+     mists, scattering reflections like dirty snow. Now, through
+     a clearing, he appears like the altar-glory of a Jesuit
+     church; raining waves of golden light; the surrounding
+     cloud-flocks are in a moment tinged with brilliance. And
+     again, he is suddenly eclipsed; all returns to dulness and
+     gloom: it might be the sad dawn of a rainy day."
+
+It is, above all, this vast and eternally busy "Pool of London" that
+is, and ever has been, the key to her greatness, her wealth, her
+power. Even the distant church bells of London, clanging fitfully
+through the "swish" of the wavelets and the eternal muffled roar of
+the City, recall to the true Londoner the commercial spirit of his
+ancestors. Does not the children's rhyme (there is ever deep reason in
+childish rhymes) run thus?
+
+  "Oranges and Lemons,
+   Say the bells of St. Clement's;
+   You owe me ten shillings,
+   Say the bells of St. Helen's;
+   When will you pay me?
+   Say the bells of Old Bailey;
+   When I grow rich,
+   Say the bells of Shoreditch."
+
+The bells, be it observed, are nothing if not business-like, and seem
+to be more nearly concerned with our temporal than with our spiritual
+welfare. But here everything tells of work, of traffic, of the endless
+and indomitable "struggle-for-life" that is so characteristic of the
+British race. Father Thames, here, may well speak in Kingsley's words:
+
+  "Darker and darker the further I go;
+   Baser and baser the richer I grow."
+
+These dingy docks, these blackened wharves, represent, in reality, the
+world's great treasure-house. For to this vast port of London comes
+all "the wealth of Ormus and of Ind," all the riches of "a thousand
+islands rocked in an idle main," all the luxuriant produce of
+new-world farms, of Colonial ranches, of tropical gardens. Here, if
+anywhere, may be realised his vision who saw
+
+  "The heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
+   Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."
+
+Jewels such as a Queen of Sheba might have dreamed of, or a Sindbad
+fabled, from "far Cathay"; ivory and gold from the mysterious East;
+spices, bark, and coral from many a land of reef and palm; these, with
+every commercial product of the globe, are daily poured into the
+ravenous and never-satisfied maw of London. This vast giant,
+enormous, helpless, is, like the queen termite, all-devouring, and yet
+would starve of actual food in few days if deprived of her
+ever-arriving cargoes. For Colonial produce, as every one knows, is,
+despite the costs of freight, far cheaper than that of our own
+country. The "Feeding of London," indeed, should prove a very
+interesting subject to those attracted by statistics.
+
+     "There are within the limits of the metropolis at least five
+     million human beings, each of whom has every day to be
+     provided with food. The difference between the plenty of one
+     class and the pittance of another is, no doubt, very marked;
+     but taking the rich and the poor together, the quantity of
+     food required is almost incredible. The necessity for large
+     imports suggests horrid possibilities for some future siege
+     of London! But as the trade and port of London have made its
+     wealth, so they have also helped it to its present enormous
+     dimensions; for though the country, by the railways, brings
+     her share of London's sustenance, yet by far the larger
+     proportion of it comes through the docks. Thus, frozen and
+     living meat comes from the far colony of New Zealand, and
+     also from the United States, Canada, the River Plate, and
+     Australia; potatoes from Malta, Portugal, and Holland; tea
+     from China and India; early vegetables from Madeira and the
+     Canary Islands; spices from Ceylon; wines from France,
+     Portugal, and Spain; oranges from all parts of the tropical
+     globe, far cheaper often than our own home-grown fruits. The
+     import of oranges, indeed, alone reaches a total of 800 or
+     900 millions yearly; that of raisins and currants some
+     12,000 tons; while other things are in proportion. The
+     unloading of the ships is done by casual helpers, called
+     "dockers" or "dock-labourers," a rough class of workmen
+     living in and around Wapping, Rotherhithe, and Stepney.
+     Their employment, though now paid at a fair rate for
+     "unskilled" labour, is necessarily heavy while it lasts, and
+     uncertain, causing often a hand-to-mouth existence, and
+     leading to frequent "strikes."--(Darlington's _London and
+     its Environs_.)
+
+The dock warehouses should be visited, if only to gain some idea of
+the enormous wealth of London.
+
+     "These docks," says M. Taine, "are prodigious, overpowering;
+     each of them is a vast port, and accommodates a multitude of
+     three-masted vessels. There are ships everywhere, ships upon
+     ships in rows ... for the most part they are leviathans,
+     magnificent ... some of them hail from all parts of the
+     world; this is the great trysting-place of the globe."
+
+The shore population, about here, consists mostly of sailors and
+fishermen; "the Sailors' Town," the region east of the Tower is
+specially called. The river scenes here are as picturesque in their
+way as any in the world, a fact of which not only Turner's pictures,
+but also Mr. Vicat Cole's "Pool of London," now in the Tate Gallery,
+may well remind us. Why, indeed, should our artists all flock to
+Venice to paint? Have we not also here golden sunsets, sails of
+Venetian red, tall masts, dappled skies, all the picturesque litter
+and crowded life that Turner so loved, suffused in an atmosphere of
+misty glory?--a glory translated by all the glamour of history and
+sentiment into
+
+  "The light that never was on land or sea,
+   The consecration and the poet's dream."
+
+To the eyes of the boy Turner, the embryo artist, the child of the
+City, all was beautiful and worthy to be painted--"black barges,
+patched sails, and every possible condition of fog." To him, even in
+mature life, "Thames' shore, with its stranded barges, and glidings of
+red sail, was dearer than Lucerne lake or Venetian lagoon." Its
+humanity appealed to him: he, as great a London lover as Dickens,
+merely expressed this feeling differently. Thus, Ruskin says of
+Turner's boyhood:
+
+     "That mysterious forest below London Bridge,--better for the
+     boy than wood of pine or grove of myrtle. How he must have
+     tormented the watermen, beseeching them to let him crouch
+     anywhere in the bows, quiet as a log, so only that he might
+     get floated down there among the ships, and round and round
+     the ships, and with the ships, and by the ships, and under
+     the ships, staring and clambering;--these the only quite
+     beautiful things he can see in all the world, except the
+     sky; but these, when the sun is on their sails, filling or
+     falling, endlessly disordered by sway of tide and stress of
+     anchorage, beautiful unspeakably; which ships also are
+     inhabited by glorious creatures--red-faced sailors, with
+     pipes, appearing over the gunwales, true knights, over their
+     castle parapets,--the most angelic beings in the whole
+     compass of London world."
+
+The Thames and its wonderful glamour, its mingled beauty and
+squalor--beauty, in the misty distance--squalor, in the more prosaic
+near view--suggests memories of Dickens, as it does of Turner.
+Memories of that "great master of tears and laughter" are, indeed,
+awakened by every bend of the stream. The romance of the mighty river
+was all-powerful with him, as with Turner; for he, too, had known it
+in his early youth. To him, also, even Thames mud afforded mysterious
+interest. Did not the blacking factory, celebrated in the pathetic
+pages of _David Copperfield_, where the miserable hours of his own
+early youth were spent, stand at the waterside, in Blackfriars? "My
+favourite lounging place," says David, "in the intervals, was old
+London Bridge (this was before its demolition in 1832), where I was
+wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people going
+by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water,
+and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the monument." The real
+David--poor little boy--may, indeed, have occasionally played at being
+a London mudlark himself, in off-hours; but this he does not tell us!
+
+     "Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse was at the water side. It
+     was down in Blackfriars. Modern improvements have altered
+     the place; but it was the last house at the bottom of a
+     narrow street, curving down hill to the river, with some
+     stairs at the end, where people took boat. It was a crazy
+     old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water
+     when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out,
+     and literally overrun with rats."
+
+The waterside scenes in _The Old Curiosity Shop_, including the wharf
+where Mr. Quilp, the vicious dwarf, broke up his ships, and where Mr.
+Sampson Brass so nearly broke his shins, were rivalled in vividness,
+thirty years afterwards, by the river chapters in _Our Mutual Friend_.
+In this later story, special stress is laid on the river suicides, and
+the consequent "dragging" for corpses, done by the watermen for
+salvage. Dreadful task! but not uncommon "down by Ratcliffe, and by
+Rotherhithe, where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed
+from higher ground, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until
+its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river."
+Near Rotherhithe--a dingy pier usually infested by mudlarks--is
+"Jacob's Island," made notorious by the scene in _Oliver Twist_. "It
+is surrounded," says Dickens, "by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet
+deep, and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in ... known in
+these days as Folly Ditch." By means of this ditch, the murderer Sikes
+tries to escape from the infuriated crowd who clamour for his life,
+but he fails in the attempt and perishes miserably.
+
+Such is the splendour, such the misery, of the richest, largest, most
+powerful city in the world! And over all the seething tides of the
+river and of humanity--the luxury and wretchedness--the "laughing,
+weeping, hurrying ever" of the crowd, still the grey dome of St.
+Paul's dominates the scene, still its "cross of gold shines over city
+and river," calm and changeless above all tides and passions. Browning
+has suggested the poetry of the view from the dome:
+
+  "Over the ball of it,
+   Peering and prying,
+   How I see all of it,
+   Life there outlying!
+   Roughness and smoothness,
+   Shine and defilement,
+   Grace and uncouthness,
+   One reconcilement."
+
+Beyond the Tower Bridge, and beyond the docks and the East End, the
+glitter of Greenwich comes in, striking yet another note in the
+ever-changing key. This palace of Greenwich, set like a jewel among
+its green hills and parks, was the favourite royal abode of the Tudor
+Sovereigns. Here Elizabeth was born, and lived in state, and here her
+brother Edward, the boy-king, died in the flower of his youth. The
+shining Observatory crowns the hill of Greenwich Park--a welcome oasis
+of green after the "midnight mirk" of the East End through which we
+have passed; and the fair frontage of the Palace recalls to us the
+historic mood in which we began our wanderings. Beautiful now with a
+new beauty, a twentieth century beauty--how lovely, in a different
+way, it must have been in those distant ages, when the splendid gilt
+barges of the nobles, with their gaily-painted awnings, were moored at
+their palatial water gates; when fair ladies sang to guitars as their
+craft glided smoothly "under tower and balcony, by garden-wall and
+gallery"; when each citizen had his private wherry, when loaded
+"tilt-boats," filled with merry passengers, plied up and down between
+Greenwich and Westminster. As is the Oxford, the Godstow Thames of
+to-day, the London Thames was then; "the stream of pleasure," no less
+than of wealth. Gazing, through the gathering twilight, over towards
+the misty shadow of vast St. Paul's, seen behind the gleaming tower of
+St. Magnus, or towards the shimmering expanse of water under the
+wharves of "London Pool," you can still be oblivious to the present
+changes; but presently you are rudely awakened by the very unpleasant
+grating of the steamer against its flimsy wooden quay; and the dulcet
+strains of "the Last Ro-wse of Summer," played to a somewhat wheezy
+accordion, reach your ears in very un-Tudor and un-toward fashion.
+Roman London, Saxon London, Elizabethan London, all fade, like Lamb's
+"dream-children," into the far-away past;--giving place to Victorian
+London,--as, jostled by a motley and not too immaculate crowd, you
+scramble sadly across the rickety gangway to the very common-place and
+unpalatial shore below London Bridge.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _An Underground Station._]
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+RAMBLES IN THE CITY
+
+     "I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares; but
+     I love the City far better. The City seems so much more in
+     earnest; its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious
+     things, sights, sounds. The City is getting its living, the
+     West End but enjoying its pleasure. At the West End you may
+     be amused; but in the City you are deeply excited."--_C.
+     Bronte_: "_Villette._"
+
+          "And who cries out on crowd and mart?
+             Who prates of stream and sea?
+           The summer in the City's heart
+             That is enough for me."
+                      --_Amy Levy_: "_A London Plane Tree._"
+
+
+The City is, by common consent, the most interesting and vital part of
+the metropolis,--interesting, not only for its past,--but for its
+present; ever-living,--eternally renewed;--a never-ceasing, impetuous,
+Niagara of energy and power. It is the pulse,--or rather the
+aorta,--of the tremendous machine of London; through its crowded veins
+rushes the life-blood of commerce, of industry, of wealth, that feeds
+and stimulates not only the town, but also the country and the nation.
+Through its ancient and narrow highways, crowds of black-coated human
+ants hurry, day by day, eager in pursuit of money, of power, and of
+their daily bread.
+
+And yet, curiously enough, it is close by these very crowded
+thoroughfares of human life and energy, that the most secluded haunts
+of peace may be found; calm "backwaters," all deserted and forgotten
+by the flowing stream that runs so near them; tiny spots of
+unsuspected greenery and ancient stone, absolutely startling in their
+quiet proximity to the surrounding din and whirl. Though the area of
+the "City," so-called, is but small, yet it abounds in such peaceful,
+undreamed-of spots; places where the painter may set up his easel, or
+even the photographer his camera, without fear of let or hindrance.
+Secluded bits of ancient churchyard, portions of long-forgotten
+convent garden, of old wall or bastion, or of antique plane-tree
+grove; it is such nooks as these that, even more than in Kensington
+Gardens, suggest Matthew Arnold's lovely lines:
+
+  "Calm soul of all things! make it mine
+   To feel, above the city's jar,
+   That there abides a peace of thine
+   Man did not make and cannot mar."
+
+To see and know the City with any proper appreciation of its interests
+and beauties, would require many days of wandering and leisured
+perambulation. In no part of London do things and views come upon the
+pedestrian with more startling suddenness. Emerging from some narrow
+and smoky alley, where the house-roofs, perhaps, nearly meet overhead,
+he may find himself, by some sharp turn of the ways, almost directly
+under the enormous blackened dome of St. Paul's,--looking, in such
+close proximity,--and especially if there happen to be any fog
+about,--of positively incredible size. Or he may find peaceful
+red-brick rectories, that suggest country villages, adjoining, in all
+charity, noisy mills and warehouses; or railways and canals, which
+give forth smoke and steam with amiable impartiality, and intersect
+streets where fragments of old houses yet linger in picturesque decay;
+or, again, noisy tram-lines, cutting through mediaeval squares, that,
+once upon a time, were peaceful and residential. Yet, after all, it
+ill becomes us to murmur at the tram-lines and the railways; we ought
+rather to be thankful that anything at all of the old time is left us.
+For, in the City, where things are, and ever must be, chiefly
+utilitarian, the survival of ancient relics is all the more to be
+wondered at.
+
+But the time of careless and rash destruction is past. The antiquarian
+spirit is now fairly in our midst, and mediaeval remains are preserved,
+sometimes even at no slight inconvenience. And when the progress of
+the world, and of railways, requires certain sites, even then the
+buildings on these, or their most interesting portions, are, so far as
+possible, spared and protected from further injury. Thus, when the
+site of "Sir Paul Pindar's" beautiful old mansion in Bishopsgate
+Street was required for the enlargements of the Great Eastern Railway
+Company, its elaborately-carved wooden front was transported bodily to
+the South Kensington Museum, which it now adorns; and the church tower
+of the ancient "All Hallows Staining," surviving its demolished nave
+and choir, still stands, a curiously isolated relic, in the green
+square of the Clothworkers' Hall; that company being bound over to
+keep it in order and repair. Similarly, the pains and the great
+expense incurred in the careful restoration of that old Holborn
+landmark, Staple Inn, a score or so of years back, are well known. And
+"Crosby Hall," anciently Crosby Place, that famous Elizabethan mansion
+commemorated in Shakespeare's _Richard III._, is now, after much
+danger and many vicissitudes, utilised for the purposes of a
+restaurant, which, at least ensures the keeping of it in proper and
+timely repair. Fifty, even thirty, years ago, ancient monuments were
+more lightly valued, sometimes even rescued with difficulty from the
+hands of the destroyer; now, however, the veneration for old landmarks
+is more widespread. Repairs to old buildings are, to a certain extent,
+always necessary; for in London, more than anywhere, long neglect
+means inevitable decay and destruction. And if in certain districts
+Philistines may yet have their way, if the taste of the builder and
+restorer is not always faultless, things have at any rate much
+improved since early Victorian days.
+
+Of the many delightful excursions to be made in and about the City,
+perhaps that to the ancient priory church of St. Bartholomew the
+Great, Smithfield, and the neighbouring precincts of the Charterhouse,
+ranks first. The church is a Norman relic unique in London, a bit of
+mediaevalism, left curiously stranded amid the desolation and
+destruction of all its compeers. Though St. Bartholomew the Great is
+easily reached from Newgate Street, being indeed but just beyond the
+famous hospital of the same name, it is yet difficult to find. Its
+diminutive and somewhat inadequate red-brick tower is but just visible
+above the row of houses that divide it from Smithfield, and the modest
+entrance to its precincts, underneath a mere shop-archway, may easily
+be missed. The church is, in fact, almost hidden by neighbouring
+houses. While its main entrance faces Smithfield, the dark,
+mysterious, densely-inhabited district called "Little Britain" crowds
+in closely upon it on two sides, and the picturesque alley named
+"Cloth Fair" abuts against it on another. It is, therefore, difficult
+to get much of a view of it anywhere from outside; you may, indeed,
+get close to it, and yet lose your way to it. The ancient priory
+church has only recently been disentangled from the surrounding
+factories and buildings, that in the lapse of careless centuries had
+been suffered to invade it.
+
+[Illustration: _Clothfair._]
+
+The entrance door from West Smithfield, though insignificant in size,
+is yet deserving of notice; for it is a pointed Early English arch
+with dog-tooth ornamentation. Hence, a narrow passage leads through a
+most quaint churchyard; an old-time burial-ground, a bit of rank and
+untended greenery, interspersed with decaying and falling gravestones,
+and hemmed in by the backs of the tottering Cloth Fair houses; ancient
+lath-and-plaster tenements, crumbling and dirty, their lower timbers
+bulging, yet most picturesque in their decay. They all appear to be
+let out in rooms to poor workers; above, patched and ragged articles
+of clothing are hanging out to dry, while on the ground floor you may
+see a shoemaker hammering away at his last, or a carpenter at his
+lathe, his light much intercepted by a big adjacent gravestone, on
+which a black cat, emblem of witchery, is sitting. The gravestones
+seem not at all to affect the cheerfulness of the population; perhaps,
+indeed, as in the case of Mr. Oram, the coffinmaker, these wax the
+more cheerful because of their gloomy surroundings. The whole scene,
+nevertheless, is most strangely weird, and reminds one of nothing so
+much as of that ghoulish churchyard described by Dickens as in
+"Tom-All-Alone's;" with this exception, that Dickens only saw the sad
+humanity of such places, and not their undoubted picturesqueness.
+
+Beyond this strange disused burial-ground the church is entered. The
+history of its foundation is a romantic one. The priory church, with
+its monastery and hospital, was the direct outcome of a religious vow.
+In the twelfth century, when the little Norman London of the day was
+the town of monasteries and church bells likened by Sir Walter Besant
+to the "Ile Sonnante" of Rabelais; in or about 1120, one of King Henry
+I.'s courtiers, Rahere or Rayer (the spelling of that time is
+uncertain), went on a pilgrimage to Rome. At Rome he, as people still
+often do, fell ill of malarial fever, and, as is less common, perhaps
+nowadays, vowed, if he recovered, to build a hospital for the
+"recreacion of poure men." Rahere was, says the chronicler, "a
+pleasant-witted gentleman, and therefore in his time called the King's
+minstrel." (Hence, no doubt, he has been called also "the King's
+jester"; though this appears to be incorrect.) Lively and
+"pleasant-witted" people are, we know, apt to take sudden conversion
+hardly; and Rahere was certainly as thorough in his dealings with the
+devil as was any mediaeval saint. In his sickness he had a vision, and
+in that vision he saw a great beast with four feet and two wings; this
+beast seized him and carried him to a high place whence he could see
+"the bottomless pit" and all its horrors. From this very disagreeable
+position he was delivered by the merciful St. Bartholomew, who
+thereupon ordered him to go home and build a church in his honour on a
+site that he should direct, assuring him that he (the saint), would
+supply the necessary funds. Returning home, Rahere gained the king's
+consent to the work, which was forthwith begun, and assisted greatly
+by miraculous agency; such as bright light shining on the roof of the
+rising edifice, wonderful cures worked there, and all such
+supernatural revelations. When Rahere died, in the odour of sanctity,
+and the first prior of his foundation, he left thirteen canons
+attached to it; which number his successor, Prior Thomas, had raised
+in 1174 to thirty-five. Thus the monastery grew through successive
+priors, till it was one of the largest religious houses in London. Its
+precincts and accessories extended at one time as far as Aldersgate
+Street; these however vanished with the dissolution of the monasteries
+by Henry VIII., and all that remains to the present day is the
+abbreviated priory church and a small part of a cloister. In monastic
+times the nave of the edifice extended, indeed, the whole length of
+the little churchyard, as far as the dog-toothed Smithfield entrance
+gate; but of the ancient church nothing now remains intact but the
+choir, with the first bay of the nave and portions of the transepts.
+Yet the recent restorations have been most successfully carried out,
+and the first view of the interior is striking in its grand old Norman
+simplicity. The choir has a triforium and a clerestory, and
+terminates in an apse, pierced by curious horseshoe arches; behind
+runs a circulating ambulatory dividing it from the adjoining "Lady
+chapel." Worthy of notice is the finely-wrought modern iron screen,
+the work of Mr. Starkie Gardner, that separates this chapel from the
+apse. The church has been altered, added to, or mutilated, from time
+to time; and other styles of architecture, such as Perpendicular, have
+occasionally been introduced; but yet the main effect of the interior
+is Norman. The beautiful Norman apse, built over and obliterated in
+the 15th century, has, by the talent of Mr. Aston Webb, been now
+restored to its original design. Indeed, the whole edifice has in
+recent times and by the efforts of late rectors and patrons, been
+extricated from dirt, lumber and decay; the work of restoration
+beginning in 1864. The restorer has done his work most faithfully,
+preserving all the old walls, and utilising the old Norman stones used
+in previous re-buildings.
+
+The high value of every inch of space, in this crowded colony of
+workers, had in course of centuries caused many and various irruptions
+into the sacred precincts. But some of the worst encroachments may
+possibly have arisen in the beginning more from the action of venal
+and careless officials and rectors, than from outside greed. Thus,
+supposing that a parishioner had, by some means or other, obtained a
+corner of the church for the stowing of his lumber, and that he paid
+rent for it duly to the churchwardens; he being in time himself
+nominated churchwarden, the rent would lapse, himself and his heirs
+becoming eventually proprietors of the said corner. Thus it is that
+abuses creep in. The state of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, a
+half-century ago, must indeed have been grief, almost despair to the
+antiquary. A fringe factory occupied the "Lady-Chapel" and even
+projected into the apse; a school was held in the triforium; and a
+blacksmith's forge filled one of the transepts. The fringe factory
+cost no less than L6,000 to buy out; the blacksmith whose forge had
+been inside the church for 250 years, was removed for a sum of
+L2,000. In the north transept you may still see the stone walls and
+arches blackened with the smoke of the forge, and a curious white
+patch, yet remaining on the pillared wall, testifies to the exact spot
+where the blacksmith's tool-cupboard used to stand. The feet of the
+horses can hardly be said to have improved the Norman pillars. Pious
+legend is already busy with the history of the reconstruction of the
+church, and I was assured that in one case the compensation money did
+its recipient little good; for he immediately set himself, as the
+phrase goes, to "swallow it." But, indeed, all that remained of the
+old church was before 1864 so hemmed in on all sides by encroaching
+houses, that the work of "buying out" must have been one of immense
+difficulty and patience. Some few of the tenants have, it seems,
+proved very obdurate and grasping; these, however, are wisely left to
+deal with till the last. One window in the now cleared and restored
+"Lady-Chapel" is still blocked by a red-tiled, rambling building, a
+highly unnecessary but most picturesque parasite which has at some
+period or other attached itself limpet-like to the old church wall.
+
+The old church is, like all London churches, dark, and it requires a
+bright day to be thoroughly appreciated. Lady sketchers are sometimes
+to be seen there, their easels set up in secluded nooks. The church,
+however, is generally more or less desolate, a curious little island
+of quiet after the surrounding din of the streets and alleys. Perhaps
+one or two strangers,--Americans most likely,--men by preference,--may
+be seen going over it; but old city churches do not, as a rule,
+attract crowds of visitors. Passers-by can rarely direct you to them,
+and even dwellers in the district can but seldom tell you where they
+are. For cockneys, even "superior" cockneys, are born and die in
+London without ever troubling themselves over the existence of these
+ancient relics of the past. Yet, if the natural beauties of St.
+Bartholomew are great, greater still is its historical interest. The
+vandalisms of the Reformation, and, later, of the Protectorate, have
+fortunately spared most of its ancient monuments, and the tomb of
+Rahere, the founder and earliest prior, shows its recumbent effigy
+still uninjured under a vaulted canopy. The tomb is on the north side
+of the choir, just inside the communion rails. Though the canopy is
+admittedly the work of a fifteenth-century artist, the effigy is said
+to belong to Rahere's own time. The founder is represented in the
+robes of his Order (the Augustinian Canons); his head has the monkish
+tonsure; a monk is on each side of him, and an angel is at his feet.
+The effigy, like several other monuments in the church, has been
+darkened all over, probably by the misplaced zeal of Cromwellian
+iconoclasts, with sombre paint; this coating, however, has been to a
+great extent removed. (In some of the other tombs and monuments the
+darkening is done with some thick black pigment, impossible entirely
+to remove.) The Latin epitaph on Rahere's tomb is simple:
+
+     "Hic jacet Raherus primus canonicus et primus prior hujus
+     ecclesiae."
+
+Some twenty years ago the tomb was opened, and Rahere's skeleton
+disclosed, together with a part of a sandal, which latter may be seen
+in a glass case among other relics in the north transept.
+
+Almost opposite the founder's tomb, looking down from the south
+triforium, is Prior Bolton's picturesque window, built by him
+evidently for the purpose of watching the revered monument. Prior
+Bolton, the most famous of Rahere's successors, ruled the convent from
+1506 to 1532; his window is a projecting oriel, and on a middle panel
+below is carved his well-known "rebus," a "bolt" passing through a
+"tun"; this rebus occurs also at other places in the church.
+
+The splendid alabaster tomb of Sir Walter Mildmay, a statesman of
+Queen Elizabeth's day, and founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
+should be noticed in the south ambulatory. The vandalism of former
+times had, curiously enough, not blackened this tomb, but endued its
+alabaster with an upper coating of sham marble--now removed. The
+remainder of the tombs and monuments will all repay inspection; and
+some of the inscriptions are very quaint. For instance, in a bay in
+the south ambulatory is a monument to a certain John Whiting and his
+wife, with the verse (nearly defaced) from Sir Henry Wotton:
+
+  "Shee first deceased, he for a little try'd
+   To live without her, lik'd it not and dy'd."
+
+And in another place is the monument to Edward Cooke, "philosopher and
+doctor," which is made of a kind of porous marble that exudes water in
+damp weather, and has inscribed on it the following appropriate
+epitaph:
+
+  "Unsluice, ye briny floods. What! can ye keep
+   Your eyes from teares, and see the marble weep?
+   Burst out for shame; or if ye find noe vent
+   For teares, yet stay and see the stones relent."
+
+Yet the marble was not altogether to be blamed. It is sad to spoil a
+poetic illusion; but it seems that in old days the church was damp, so
+damp that the rector--if report is to be believed--had to preach
+sometimes under an umbrella, and the marble "wept" abundantly. Now,
+however, that the building is repaired and properly warmed, the
+"stones relent" no more.
+
+St. Bartholomew has had, too, its quota of famous parishioners.
+Milton, that constant though wandering Londoner, lived close by at one
+time, in his "pretty garden-house" of Aldersgate (that garden-house
+that was yet so dull that his young wife ran away temporarily both
+from it and him!); and the poet probably attended divine service in
+the church. Hogarth, the painter, was baptised here, as the parish
+registers tell. The congregation of the present day, however, comes,
+as is so often the case with old city churches, mainly from outside.
+The immediate neighbourhood is hardly church-going, being a
+collection of narrow alleys and mysterious courts. And yet, in these
+dark purlieus of "Little Britain," house-room is frightfully dear, and
+in the crumbling tenements of "Cloth Fair," a poor room costs about
+6_s._ per week. As to the population, only fifteen years ago they were
+rough, rowdy, even criminal in places; now, however, the district is
+mainly respectable, although overcrowded by workers--factory hands,
+private manufacturers, widows who work in City offices and who cling
+to the locality as being near and convenient. It is very difficult for
+the authorities to obviate overcrowding in certain central London
+districts. Little Britain, now devoted to warehouses and tenement
+dwellings, was in old days filled with book-shops; indeed, the whole
+district used to be literary, for Milton Street, near by, was the
+"Grub Street" of Pope's obloquy in the _Dunciad_. In Little Britain
+are still good houses to be seen here and there; and Cloth Fair itself
+was once inhabited by grandees and merchant princes. That dingy but
+romantic alley still boasts an old lath-and-plaster house, that once
+was the Earl of Warwick's; its picturesque windows surmount a humble
+tallow chandler's shop; but its towering decrepitude still has
+dignity, and the Earl's arms still adorn its front. It was good enough
+for an Earl in old days; now, however, his dog would hardly be allowed
+to sleep in it!
+
+When "Bartholomew Fair" was a great annual festivity, it was in Cloth
+Fair that the famous "Court of Pie Powdre" used to be held, that court
+which, during fair-time, corrected weights and measures and granted
+licenses. It was called the "Court of Pie Powdre" because "justice was
+done there as speedily as dust can fall from the foot."
+
+In mediaeval days, the open space of Smithfield--now a meat
+market--was, as every one knows, a shambles of another sort. Here
+suffered that noble army of Marian martyrs, who proudly for
+conscience' sake faced the flame; here burned those hideous fires that
+long blackened the English name. The little row of houses facing
+Smithfield,--under which is the archway and dog-toothed gate to the
+old church, already mentioned,--is, so far as one can gather from an
+old print, little altered since those cruel days when mayors,
+grandees, and respectable citizens would sit and watch the tortures of
+poor, faithful men and women. Especially at the beautiful Anne Askew's
+burning, "the multitude and concourse," says Foxe, "of the people was
+exceeding; the place where they stood being railed about to keep out
+the press. Upon the bench under St. Bartholomew's Church sate
+Wriothesley, chancellor of England, the old Duke of Norfolk," etc.
+etc.... Strange times, indeed! when, (said Byron):
+
+  "Christians did burn each other, quite persuaded
+   That all the Apostles would have done as they did."
+
+At the Smithfield fires perished in all 277 persons, whose only
+memorial is now an inscribed stone on the outer wall of St.
+Bartholomew's Hospital, commemorating three of them in these words:
+
+     "Within a few yards of this spot John Rogers, John Bradford,
+     John Philpot, servants of God, suffered death by fire for
+     the faith of Christ, in the years 1555, 1556, 1557."
+
+Smithfield, or Smoothfield as it was first called, was even in very
+early times a place of slaughter and execution; here the Scotch
+patriot, Sir William Wallace, was done to death in 1305, and here, in
+1381, the rebel Wat Tyler was slain by Sir William Walworth.
+Originally a tournament and tilt ground, Smithfield was in those days
+a broad meadow-land fringed with elms, beyond the old London walls.
+Miracle-plays, public executions, tortures, fairs, and burnings appear
+to have taken place here in indiscriminate alternation, until
+Smithfield became, first, the great cattle-fair of London, and,
+finally, the modern meat-market. Its present charm, if any, must be
+all "in the eye of the seer;" for it is, in truth, a noisy,
+unattractive spot, with but little suggestion of ancient romance about
+it.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield._]
+
+St. Bartholomew's Hospital, of which the long front faces the
+market-place, forms part of Rahere's original foundation. Refounded by
+Henry VIII. after the dissolution of the monasteries, it is now almost
+the wealthiest, as well as the oldest, hospital in London. It admits
+over 100,000 patients annually, and its medical school is famous. Just
+within its Smithfield gateway, which dates from the year 1702, and is
+adorned by a statute of Henry VIII., is the church of St. Bartholomew
+the Less, originally built by Rahere just after his return from Rome,
+but re-erected in 1823. The spacious courtyards of the hospital,
+collegiate in size and cleanliness, and pleasantly shaded by trees,
+afford pretty and pathetic sights. Here, on fine days of spring and
+summer, a few convalescents, pale and bandaged, may be seen sitting
+out and enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, talking, reading, or
+simply engrossed in watching a game of ball played by the students.
+Those boy- or girl-patients who are well on the road to recovery,
+often tend or supervise still younger patients, the pretty
+white-capped nurses occasionally lending a hand--it is a charming
+sight. The last time that I passed by the Smithfield front of the
+hospital, a poor tramp lay prone on the broad steps of the patients'
+entrance, and a porter was sympathetically and tenderly preparing to
+lift him inside; it was a picture of the Good Samaritan.
+
+But St. Bartholomew's precincts are not the only "haunts of peace" in
+this noisy neighbourhood. Crossing the Metropolitan Meat Market, and
+picking your way northward, through innumerable ugly tram-lines, you
+presently reach the quiet and restful Charterhouse Square, whence,
+through an archway, the precincts of the ancient monastery are
+entered. Charterhouse Square, once an enclosure of seventeenth-century
+palaces, is a delightful old place even yet; though its sober
+residential look of time-darkened red brick is now but a blind, and it
+is rapidly becoming a square of hotels and lodging-houses. Such a fate
+was, of course, inevitable in its case; and yet it seems mournful. The
+spot where Rutland House, the ancient residence of the Venetian
+ambassador, once stood, is only commemorated now in the name of
+Rutland Place. The City palaces have crumbled; they have all been
+rebuilt in the far West; and even Bloomsbury has none left, except
+those which are devoted to the modern flat! One of the prettiest
+houses now to be seen in the present Charterhouse Square,--its front
+trellised over with bright Virginian creeper, such a house as Miss
+Thackeray loved to describe,--is now a "home" fitted up by a big city
+warehouse for the accommodation of its working girls. The square
+garden is still nicely kept; Janus-faced, it looks on to the world's
+noisy mart on the one side, and, on the other, towards conventual
+peace.
+
+But you must not linger in Charterhouse Square; time is passing, and
+the archway leading to the ancient sanctuary invites you. The
+guide-books tell you that this archway is in the "Perpendicular"
+style; that its projecting shelf above is supported by lions; this
+and much more; but you do not always feel in a mood to digest
+guide-books. They are so aggressive in their information, and so
+distracting to one's own thoughts! For, how many associations does not
+this classic abode recall! You can easily imagine groups of tonsured,
+cowled friars, standing here and there in the shadows of the
+quadrangles; one "grey friar" of a later time, with "the order of the
+Bath on his breast," perhaps, most of all.
+
+This Carthusian monastery, so powerful in mediaeval times, and founded
+by Sir Walter Manny as early as 1321, was suppressed by the rapacity
+of Henry VIII., that brutal though necessary reformer. The story of
+the dissolution is a cruel and heartrending one. Prior Houghton, the
+last superior of the monastery, protested against the king's
+spoliation of Church lands; he was promptly convicted of high treason,
+and, with several of his monks, was "hanged, drawn, and quartered" at
+Tyburn. They died gallantly, and in their deaths we revere that true
+and sturdy spirit that still in our own day leads England on to glory:
+
+     "If" (says Froude) "we would understand the true spirit of
+     the time, we must regard Catholics and Protestants as
+     gallant soldiers, whose deaths, when they fall, are not
+     painful, but glorious; and whose devotion we are equally
+     able to admire, even where we cannot equally approve their
+     cause. Courage and self-sacrifice are beautiful alike in an
+     enemy and in a friend. And while we exult in that chivalry
+     with which the Smithfield martyrs bought England's freedom
+     with their blood, so we will not refuse our admiration to
+     those other gallant men whose high forms, in the sunset of
+     the old faith, stand transfigured on the horizon, tinged
+     with the light of its dying glory."
+
+Prior Houghton's bloody arm, severed from his murdered corpse, was
+hung up over the gateway of his sanctuary, to awe his remaining monks
+into obedience; while his head was exposed on London Bridge. Brutal,
+indeed, were our forefathers of the Tudor time!
+
+The Charterhouse, after the banishment and death of its monks, passed
+through the hands of several of the king's favourites, and came
+eventually into those of the Duke of Norfolk, who altered it
+considerably, making it less monastic and more palatial in character.
+But a new era of usefulness awaited the ancient convent; better days
+for it were at hand. For it was finally sold by the Norfolk family to
+one Thomas Sutton, a rich and philanthropic Northumbrian coal-owner,
+who converted it into a "Hospital" for eighty poor men, and a school
+for forty poor boys. The school, so picturesque in Thackeray's
+_Newcomes_, no longer exists here as in old days; in 1872, the modern
+craze for fresh air transferred it to new premises at Godalming; and
+the boys' vacated buildings were sold to the Merchant Taylors' Company
+for their own school. The almshouses for the poor brothers remain,
+however, just as they were. Times change, and, though the aged
+bedesmen are yet poor, it is doubtful whether all the boys who benefit
+from the foundation, can still be called so. The school, like other
+foundations of its kind, probably now benefits a higher class than old
+Thomas Sutton intended.
+
+Many noted men have been pupils of the Charterhouse; Thackeray,
+especially, has immortalised his old school in his touching
+description of "Founder's Day"; when old Colonel Newcome, in his turn
+both pupil and poor brother, sits humbly among the aged pensioners,
+clad in his black gown:
+
+     "I chanced to look up from my book towards the swarm of
+     black-coated pensioners: and amongst them--amongst
+     them--sate Thomas Newcome. His dear old head was bent down
+     over his prayer-book; there was no mistaking him. He wore
+     the black gown of the pensioners of the Hospital of Grey
+     Friars. His order of the Bath was on his breast. He stood
+     there amongst the poor brethren, uttering the responses to
+     the psalm.... I heard no more of prayers, and psalms, and
+     sermon, after that."
+
+The whole of the Charterhouse breathes the old man's spirit; is
+perambulated by his frail ghost, the shadow of a Grey Friar. The
+letters, "I.H." worked out in red on the bricks in Washhouse Court,
+(part of the old monastery), though supposed to show the initials of
+the martyred Prior Houghton, are not so vivid to us as the little
+house in the same court, pointed out as the place where Colonel
+Newcome died!
+
+Ghosts there may be in the Charterhouse, but their identity is not
+divulged. "Some people," the porter owns, under pressure, "have been
+known to see strange things," though he for his part has only come
+across rats, so far. Perhaps the boys have "laid" them! boys, it must
+be confessed, would make short work of most ghosts. The boys, on the
+"Founder's Day" mentioned by Thackeray, used always to sing the
+Carthusian chorus in the old merchant's honour:
+
+  "Then blessed be the memory
+   Of good old Thomas Sutton,
+   Who gave us lodging, learning,
+   As well as beef and mutton."
+
+They sing it still, no doubt, equally heartily at Godalming; yet,
+surely, some among them must yearn for the historic associations of
+the old place. But, indeed, all the ancient schools are going, or
+gone, from the City; St. Paul's School is moved to Hammersmith; the
+picturesque Christ's Hospital is just disintegrated; its
+characteristic Lares and Penates are removed to Horsham; and the
+passengers along noisy Newgate Street will no longer stay to enjoy the
+romps and the foot-ball of the yellow-legged, blue-coated boys.
+
+The brick courts of the Charterhouse have a solid and collegiate air;
+its small Jacobean chapel, of which the groined entrance alone dates
+from monastic times, contains a splendid alabaster tomb of the
+Founder. Here is Thackeray's striking description of a "Founder's Day"
+service:
+
+     "The boys are already in their seats, with smug fresh faces,
+     and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners
+     are on their benches; the chapel is lighted, and Founder's
+     Tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters, heraldries,
+     darkles and shines with the most wonderful shadows and
+     lights. There he lies, Foundator Noster, in his ruff and
+     gown, awaiting the great Examination Day.... Yonder sit
+     forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about home and holidays
+     to-morrow. Yonder sit some three-score old gentlemen of the
+     hospital, listening to the prayers and the psalms. You hear
+     them coughing feebly in the twilight,--the old reverend
+     blackgowns.... A plenty of candles lights up this chapel,
+     and this scene of age and youth, and early memories, and
+     pompous death. How solemn the well-remembered prayers are,
+     here uttered again in the place where in childhood we used
+     to hear them! How beautiful and decorous the rite; how noble
+     the ancient words of the supplications which the priest
+     utters, and to which generations of fresh children, and
+     troops of bygone seniors have cried Amen! under those
+     arches! The service for Founder's Day is a special one; one
+     of the psalms selected being the thirty-seventh, and we
+     hear--'v. 23. The steps of a good man are ordered by the
+     Lord: and he delighteth in his way. 24. Though he fall, he
+     shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him
+     with his hand. 25. I have been young, and now am old; yet
+     have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging
+     their bread."
+
+The Carthusians, as visitors to the monastery of the "Grande
+Chartreuse" already know, lived almost entirely in small houses of
+their own. These exist here no longer, but the ancient brick cloister
+that extends along the playground belongs to the old convent. The many
+rambling courts and low buildings of the Charterhouse are, no doubt,
+puzzling on a first visit. "There is," says Thackeray, "an old Hall, a
+beautiful specimen of the architecture of James's time; an old Hall?
+many old halls; old staircases, old passages, old chambers decorated
+with old portraits, walking in the midst of which, we walk as it were
+in the early seventeenth century." The dining-hall, which used to be
+the monastic guest-chamber, is used now by the old bedesmen; it is
+fine, with its dark panelling and its look of comfortable solidity.
+This was the part of the old Charterhouse adapted for his own dwelling
+by the Duke of Norfolk; and the wide Elizabethan staircase, leading to
+the "Officers' Library," is almost exactly as it was in his time. A
+curfew, tolled every evening at eight or nine o'clock p.m., proclaims
+the number of the poor brethren. It was with reference to this custom
+that Thackeray wrote his infinitely touching description of the death
+of Thomas Newcome:
+
+     "At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll,
+     and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time.
+     And just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile
+     shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and
+     quickly said '_Adsum_,' and fell back. It was the word we
+     used at school, when names were called; and lo, he, whose
+     heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his
+     name, and stood in the presence of The Master."
+
+But the Charterhouse has now come more or less to be a "show place";
+and, interesting as are visits to the show places of London, I often
+think that a mere aimless ramble through the streets of the City is
+more soothing and refreshing to the average mind. Human nature is
+contradictory, delighting in the unexpected; also, so far as lasting
+impressions go, it is incapable of thoroughly taking in much at one
+time. Everybody knows that places where you are "shown round" are
+fatiguing; what you really enjoy is what you can find out for your own
+poor self. In London streets, the unexpected is always happening;
+thus, through the hideous plate glass of a bar parlour, you may catch
+glimpses of waving trees and grey towers, and even the dreadful glare
+of London advertisement hoardings does not "wholly abolish or destroy"
+the ancient charm of the crowded, irregular City streets. A City of
+parallel lines and squares, such as the Colonials love! Perish the
+thought! Let them widen Southampton Row if they will, remove Holywell
+Street and King Street if they list; but let us at any rate keep to
+our old and devious ways through the heart of the City!
+
+Just west of the Charterhouse, reached from Smithfield by St. John
+Street, is another stranded islet of the past, St. John's Gate,
+Clerkenwell. This is the only remaining relic of the mediaeval Priory
+of St. John, the chief English seat of the "Knights Hospitallers of
+St. John of Jerusalem," founded in Henry I.'s reign by a baron named
+Jordan Briset and Muriel his wife. The early Priory was burnt by the
+rebels under Wat Tyler, and, when rebuilt, the newer building was used
+in many reigns as a resort of royalty. After many vicissitudes, the
+Order of St. John's Knights was suppressed by that archiconoclast
+Henry VIII. who, for the purpose, resorted to his usual persuasive
+methods of beheading, hanging, and quartering. Nevertheless, the
+Priory continued to be used as a Royal residence by Henry's daughter,
+Mary. The fragment of the old building that remains to us is its south
+gate, built by Prior Docwra in 1504. It is a fine bit of perpendicular
+architecture; on the gateway's north side are the arms of Docwra and
+of his Order, on the south side, those of France and England. In the
+centre of the groined roof is the Lamb bearing a flag, kneeling on the
+Gospels. The rest of the Priory buildings have long vanished;
+destroyed, for the most part, by the ambitious Protector Somerset, by
+whose order they were blown up for building materials for his fine new
+Strand palace. The later history of the old Gate is mainly
+journalistic; demonstrating that typical change from the calm of
+conventual seclusion to the thunder of printing-press publicity, so
+common in central London. Dr. Johnson lived here in his early days of
+hack work in the old rooms above the Gate, working for Cave the
+printer, the founder of the _Gentleman's Magazine_, at so much per
+sheet, and living here an inky, dirty, hermit-like existence; seeing
+no one, and "eating his food behind a screen, being too shabby for
+publicity." The chair he used is still treasured. (St. John's Gate is
+a familiar object to many who have not really seen it, owing to its
+representation, in pale purple, on the outside cover of the
+_Gentleman's Magazine_.) The gate is now appropriately occupied by the
+Order of St. John, a charitable institution devoted to ambulance and
+hospital work. Part of the old priory church may be seen in the fine
+Norman crypt of St. John's Church close by. People used to visit this
+crypt to see the coffin (now buried), of "Scratching Fanny, the Cock
+Lane Ghost": this was a fraud perpetrated by a girl and her father,
+for gain. A plausible story was invented, and many notable people were
+duped by it; but by Dr. Johnson's investigations the hoax was at
+length discovered.
+
+A ramble down Bishopsgate, in the inconsequent way already suggested,
+will be found thoroughly enjoyable; though it has, of course, the
+defect of being exceptionally easy of accomplishment. For this
+purpose, an omnibus to the Mansion House will land you exactly where
+you want to be. I may add that it is very important to choose a fine
+day for the excursion, a day when those imposing golden letters on the
+Royal Exchange--the "Anno Elizabethae" and "Anno Victoriae"--glitter
+like so many suns above the unceasing whirlpool of human life and
+energy below. Have you ever thought, as you looked on those golden
+letters, how interesting they may prove to some future antiquary? Like
+the "M. Agrippa Cos Tertium Fecit" on the Roman Pantheon, they tell,
+proudly, of the glory of a great nation. It is noteworthy that the
+names of two queens should here represent England's highest fame, and
+commemorate thus, in close juxtaposition, the Elizabethan and
+Victorian Age.
+
+The Victorian Age, however, with its bustle and movement, is very much
+with us as we approach Bishopsgate along the route of Holborn Viaduct.
+If you elect to travel on the top of an omnibus, you will find that
+Newgate Street and Cheapside show, in turn and on each side, a
+scintillating kaleidoscope of light and colour. Rambles are all very
+well in their way; but, under some circumstances, Mr. Gladstone's
+dictum was a right one; the top of an omnibus is a wonderful point of
+view. So we will go on a 'bus to the Mansion House, and ramble
+afterwards. First comes St. Paul's, its imposing dome rising
+majestically in ponderous blackness through its surrounding greenery;
+then the gloomy walls of grim Newgate prison; next, the pale,
+ghost-like spire of St. Mary-le-Bow, shining over its blackened base
+and the many-coloured street vista below, and, finally, the great
+civic buildings of the City proper, forming in the sunlight, a sort of
+white-and-golden circle, a central focusing point of colour and
+energy, whence diverge, like so many wheel-spokes, all the great
+business thoroughfares. The stranger, set down here for the first
+time, generally completely loses his bearings, and even the practised
+Londoner sometimes finds himself at a loss. (In a "London particular"
+he may even find himself in a very Inferno.) But the cool inner
+courtyard of the Royal Exchange, sought as a refuge, will speedily
+restore his disordered faculties, and give him time to get out his
+pocket-map. Here, let into the inner wall of the colonnade, are modern
+paintings of scenes in the history of London by eminent artists, among
+which the contrasted pictures of the two great queens (respectively by
+Ernest Crofts and R. W. Macbeth) carry out something of the feeling
+suggested by the gold-lettered pediment. Elizabeth, on a spirited
+charger, golden-haired and in picturesque sixteenth century dress,
+opens Sir Thomas Gresham's earlier building; Victoria, a slim girlish
+figure, standing between the "great Duke" and Prince Albert,
+inaugurates the later.
+
+Round about the "Exchange" precincts, several sensible, sober, and
+practical-looking gentlemen sit, casually, on stone chairs; Mr.
+Peabody is on one side, Sir Rowland Hill, the penny postage reformer,
+is on the other. So far as I have seen, they are the only people in
+this crowded ant-heap who have any leisure for sitting down! Opposite
+the Royal Exchange, at No. 15 Cornhill, is a little shop of old
+time--Birch and Birch--painted in green and red. It is a very
+unassuming little confectioner's shop, and its tiny, abridged
+shop-front with the narrow panes of glass has certainly an antique
+look. But not unassuming are the civic banquets which this firm is
+often called upon to supply. The churches in the narrow street of
+Cornhill come upon the pedestrian, if, indeed, they come upon him at
+all, as surprises. Of St. Michael's nothing can be seen from the
+street but its tower and richly-carved modern doorway fixed between
+two plate-glass shop-fronts. The doorway has projecting heads and a
+relief of St. Michael weighing souls; a business-like proceeding, I
+may remark, that well befits the City. Further on, comes St.
+Peter-upon-Cornhill, the body of the church completely masked by
+shops, and only the tower to be seen over the roofs from the further
+side of the street. Most of these City churches are open at mid-day,
+and the stranger is usually free to walk round and see what he will,
+without let or hindrance, ignored by the sextoness or pew-opener, who
+is generally a superior old lady in black silk, attached to the church
+some thirty or forty years, and almost as much a part of it as its
+furniture. Church caretakers' lives must be healthier than one would
+imagine, for they seem, as a race, given to longevity. Visitors are
+rarely encouraged in London churches. The charwomen employed in
+scrubbing the aisles seem to regard intruders as unnecessary
+nuisances. "Church shut for to-day," one cried triumphantly when she
+saw me coming. It is interesting to note that, when Thackeray edited
+the _Cornhill Magazine_, his editorial window looked out upon this
+church of St. Peter. Now, Bishopsgate Street turns down out of
+Cornhill to the left, and spacious banks, built in varying degrees of
+splendour, line the thoroughfare.
+
+Close by, in Threadneedle Street, was the old "South Sea House," noted
+for the famous "Bubble" of 1720, that ruined so many thousands. E. M.
+Ward's picture of the wild excitement caused by the "Bubble" in the
+neighbouring Change Alley, is well known. In Bishopsgate Street,
+almost opposite Crosby Hall, is the splendid "National and Provincial
+Bank," unique in sumptuousness, its large hall lined with polished
+granite columns in the Byzantine-Romanesque style--a style, one would
+think, more ecclesiastical than financial. If they had dug this sort
+of place out of old Pompeii, what would the antiquaries have called
+it? No statues of Plutus or of Mercury would have helped them to their
+finding! Alas! in our foggy climate, we dare not indulge ourselves
+with sculptured Lares and Penates; and we must needs content ourselves
+with those few square-toed, frock-coated celebrities whose statues, of
+gigantic size, confront us at our chief partings of the roads. They
+have, certainly, gathered funereal trappings galore in their time;
+their grime and blackness deceive even the wary London sparrows, who
+build their nests fearlessly about the giants' heads and shoulders.
+
+To return to Bishopsgate Street: Crosby Hall, the ancient mediaeval
+palace and modern restaurant, to which I have before alluded, is,
+though much repaired and repainted, still dignified; in the interior
+of the restaurant all details are carefully studied, even to the
+antique china stands for glasses, and the old-fashioned spotted
+cambric dresses of the serving-maids.
+
+Close by Crosby Hall is the turning into Great St. Helen's; indeed,
+the long windows of the hall back on to the square of that name. This
+curious old convent church, set in its little secluded enclosure, has
+been called "the Westminster Abbey of the City." It is certainly rich
+in historical tombs and monuments. Originally founded in the 13th
+century as the "Priory of St. Helen's for Nuns of the Benedictine
+Order," its accessories have, like those of St. Bartholomew the Great,
+been long removed and built over, and its cloisters exist no more. Yet
+what remains of it is full of interest. It is comparatively very
+unvisited. The last time I was there, I noticed one depressed
+American, "doing" the tombs sadly. I felt for him, for though it was
+only 3 o'clock on an October day, it was much too dark to read or see,
+and he had evidently lost himself among the monuments. The sextoness,
+who was apparently engaged in the careful brushing of her black silk
+dress in the vestry, was much too superior to notice him. St. Helen's
+is a dark church at any time; on this occasion a "London particular"
+was also impending, and even the gold letters on Sir Thomas Gresham's
+massive tomb scarcely showed in the fading light. But it was a
+picturesque scene, despite the sad lack of "glory on the walls." The
+old knights and ladies, motionless on their narrow beds, glimmered in
+ghostly fashion, silent witnesses of the flight of the centuries. The
+quaint, stiff effigies, clad in ruff and farthingale,--while they have
+knelt there, how many generations, in the turbulent world outside,
+have been born and died? Bancroft's unwieldy tomb is gone from its
+old place; else you might well have imagined the shade of the
+eccentric philanthropist stealing from it by night, pressing back its
+careful hinges, and fumbling for the bread and wine that he had
+ordered by will to be placed near by for his awakening. You mistook,
+in the dim light, Sir John Spencer's kneeling heiress-daughter for a
+guardian angel, and you were awed by the still, calm mediaevalism of
+the altar-tomb of the Crosbys.... It was all so vague and so misty
+that the mind really seemed to participate in the general fog, and I
+remember gazing vaguely on the words, "Julius Caesar,"--inscribed, in
+enormous letters, on a sumptuous altar-tomb,--feeling that I fervently
+sympathised with the royal lady who, when shown the magic name, is
+said to have remarked naively:
+
+"But I always thought that Julius Caesar was buried in Rome!"
+
+It is surely very unfair for individuals to perpetrate post-mortem
+puzzles of the kind! For this "Julius Caesar," (who, by-the-way,
+gained his false honours by dropping his surname) was merely a Judge
+and a Master of the Rolls of Elizabeth's day, and, evidently, as shown
+by his tomb, designed by himself, what is called "a crank" also. When
+I had got over the "Julius Caesar" deception, I sympathised duly with
+the large family of "John Robinson, alderman," whose children form a
+long kneeling procession behind him; and still more did I mourn for
+those unhappy nuns who, poor things, were immured in the darkness
+behind "the Nuns' Grate," or "hagioscope"; their scant peepholes so
+unkindly devised that they could only see the altar, and not the
+congregation! These "Black Nuns" of St. Helen's must, nevertheless,
+one thinks, have been often but naughty, giggling school-girls,
+despite their show of conventual discipline. Perhaps, as Chaucer would
+have us believe, such discipline was but lax in England in the middle
+ages. Be that as it may, we find, at one time, no less authorities
+than the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's admonishing them thus:
+
+     "Also we enjoyne you, that all daunsyng and reveling be
+     utterly forborne among you, except at Christmasse, and other
+     honest tymys of recreacyone, among yourselfe usyd, in
+     absence of seculars in alle wyse."
+
+Of the two aisles that form the church, the "Nuns' Aisle" is that to
+the left as you enter, and the steps to their destroyed cloister (now
+blocked up) open out of it. The little garden plot outside the church
+is neatly kept, and on my last visit I noticed some gardeners putting
+in a plentiful supply of bulbs for spring blooming. Doubtless, the
+"Black Nuns" enjoyed among their other "recreacyones," a lovely and a
+well-ordered convent garden outside their cloister; "cherry trees" are
+specially mentioned in St. Helen's register; and, as we know, the
+London of that day grew many luscious fruits.
+
+Farther down Bishopsgate Street, is the tiny church of St. Ethelburga,
+uninteresting as regards its interior, but one of the oldest existing
+churches in London, and certainly the smallest. It escaped the ravages
+of the Great Fire, and history mentions it as early as 1366. I passed
+it three times without noticing it, for its little spirelet rises but
+slightly above the roofs of the intervening shops, and its tiny
+doorway, labelled itself like a small shop, is easily overlooked
+between two projecting windows. (The smallness of the place can be
+imagined from the fact that, only a few doors from it, no one can be
+found to direct you to it.) The verger lives in a very picturesque and
+overhanging slum-alley close by; though his abode suggests Fagin, he
+is, nevertheless, an amiable and obliging gentleman.
+
+Just east of Bishopsgate is Houndsditch (its somewhat unpleasantly
+suggestive name commemorating the ancient City moat), with, near by,
+the Jewish quarter of St. Mary Axe, "Rag Fair," and Petticoat Lane
+(now Middlesex Street), noted, like Brick Lane, Spitalfields, for its
+Sunday morning markets. Why is the Jewish quarter so invariably
+concerned with old clothes? As the rhyme says:
+
+  "Jews of St. Mary Axe, of jobs so wary
+   That for old clothes they'd even axe St. Mary."
+
+Close by Houndsditch is Bevis Marks (Bury's Marks), now descended from
+its ancient glories; it used to contain the City mansion, "fair courts
+and garden plots," of the Abbots of Bury St. Edmunds, but now
+principally recalls Dickens's unsavoury characters, Miss Sally Brass
+and her brother Sampson (in _The Old Curiosity Shop_). Here, once
+again, Dickens gets thoroughly the strange, semi-human spirit of
+London slums and by-ways; it is in such places that his genius attains
+its highest flights. That he was always, too, very careful as regarded
+his details, is shown in a letter on this subject to his friend
+Forster. He spent (he says), a whole morning in Bevis Marks,
+selecting:
+
+     "the office window, with its threadbare green curtain all
+     awry; its sill just above the two steps which lead from the
+     side-walk to the office door, and so close on the footway
+     that the passenger who takes the wall brushes the dim glass
+     with his elbow."
+
+It seems, however, almost too invidious to select special rambles.
+For, the whole of this heart of the city,--except only for certain
+well-defined "infernos" of modern industry and ugliness, such as the
+great Liverpool-Street terminus, must be deeply interesting to every
+Londoner and every Englishman. Even in comparatively dull streets,
+lined with warehouses and offices, there will always be some little
+oasis to rest and refresh the wanderer. Suppose that, instead of going
+up Cornhill, you take another wheel-spoke from the Mansion-House; say
+Lombard-Street, the home _par excellence_ of the bankers. This street
+is solid and stately, as you would expect; the very name has a moneyed
+ring about it! The derivation of the name, by-the-way, is curious; it
+comes from Lombard bankers who appear to have settled here at an early
+date; the street bore their name in the reign of Edward II. The square
+tower, crowned by an octagonal spire, that rises on the north side of
+Lombard Street, is that of the church of St. Edmund the King and
+Martyr, in which was made poor Addison's not too happy marriage with
+the Dowager Countess of Warwick and Holland. Still continuing east,
+past Gracechurch Street, we come to Fenchurch Street, a thoroughfare
+that runs parallel with the busy mart of Eastcheap, famed in
+Shakespeare, and possibly no less dirty and noisy than it was in Dame
+Quickly's time. Out of Fenchurch Street opens Mincing Lane, a name
+that commemorates the "minchens" or nuns of St. Helen's; that convent
+owned a great deal of property about here. The Clothworkers' Hall,
+close by, is reached through an iron gate; its garden, or court, is
+formed by the ancient churchyard of All Hallows, Staining, a church
+destroyed, all but its tower, by the Great Fire, and not rebuilt. The
+tower of All Hallows, a stranded fragment of antiquity, forms the
+centre piece of the garden court, where its effect is most curious and
+striking.
+
+The narrow old streets that lead north out of Cheapside, the "Chepe"
+of the middle ages, with their quaint old names, afford many pleasant
+rambles. In Wood Street, the old plane-tree, still standing, recalls
+Wordsworth's poem. Milk Street leads by the old church of St. Mary
+Aldermanbury, with the statue of Shakespeare in its little churchyard,
+to the still visible bastions of London Wall, and along the street of
+that name, to Cripplegate. The church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, is
+interesting; its churchyard, too, is a green and favoured spot. A
+street of warehouses near it was burned down quite recently with
+terrible loss, and the church itself was threatened, but fortunately
+escaped; but the streets, now rebuilt, look, thanks to the City's
+wonderful recuperative powers, as solid and as flourishing as ever.
+The noisy thoroughfare of Fore Street, lined with warehouses and
+foundries, is built upon the ancient line of wall, which also appears,
+black against sunflowers, asters, and greenery, in St. Giles's
+churchyard and rectory garden. This part of the City wall is probably
+of Edward IV.'s time. Portions of the old Roman wall have indeed been
+discovered here and there in the City; a large fragment of it was, for
+instance, laid bare at the building of the new departments of the
+General Post Office in 1891. But the oldest fragments of wall
+existing near Cripplegate are, though black, grimy, and mouldering,
+probably Norman or Saxon. Roman relics that have been discovered in
+the City are on view, some at the Guildhall, others in the British
+Museum; the most interesting of them all, however, is still _in situ_,
+being the large fragment called "London Stone," built into St.
+Swithin's Church opposite the Cannon Street Terminus; supposed to be a
+"milliarium," or milestone, and possibly, like the golden milestone in
+the Roman Forum, "a central mark whence the great Roman roads radiated
+all over England."
+
+The street called "London Wall" testifies to the care of the City for
+its ancient monuments. The ruins of the old fortifications are
+carefully built up, embanked, and made picturesque by a narrow strip
+of greenery that was once the churchyard of St. Alphage over the way.
+They are railed in from injury, and a memorial tablet is affixed. The
+dwellers in the district still, however, seem densely ignorant as to
+its meaning. I lately asked several youthful inhabitants, engaged in
+the fascinating pavement game of "hop-scotch," what they supposed the
+place was. They could not answer. The School Board, if rumour speaks
+truly, is surely doing well to include the history of London in its
+curriculum.
+
+The street of London Wall has the distinction of possessing the very
+ugliest church in the metropolis, that of St. Alphage. It has, indeed,
+the one merit of being so small as easily to escape notice; though
+hardly its ancient foundation, or the interesting monument inside it
+to Lord Mayor Sir Rowland Hayward's two wives and sixteen "happy
+children," redeem it from utter dreariness.
+
+But we must now desist from our rambles, though there is yet much to
+see; night is falling; that mysterious night that brings such strange
+contrast to the City streets; the wild, fitful fever of their long day
+is ended, and they are left to silence. The busy throng of workers
+hurries homeward; soon, in the highways scarcely a belated footfall
+resounds, while in the byways, by day so crowded, there reigns a calm
+as of the sea at rest; like the sea's, too, is that faint, unceasing
+tremor of the great City, the City that never sleeps. To quote the
+poet of "Cockaigne":
+
+  "Temples of Mammon are voiceless again--
+   Lonely policemen inherit Mark Lane--
+   Silent is Lothbury--quiet Cornhill--
+   Babel of Commerce, thine echoes are still.
+
+  "Westward the stream of humanity glides;--
+  'Buses are proud of their dozen insides;
+   Put up thy shutters, grim Care, for to-day,
+   Mirth and the lamplighter hurry this way."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ST. PAUL'S AND ITS PRECINCTS
+
+     "A deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first
+     I knew it not; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the
+     twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said, 'I lie in
+     the shadow of St. Paul's.' ... The next day I awoke, and saw
+     the risen sun struggling through fog. Above my head, above
+     the housetops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a
+     solemn, orbed mass, dark-blue and dim--the DOME. While I
+     looked, my inner self moved; my spirit shook its
+     always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as
+     if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to
+     taste life: in that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah's
+     gourd."--_Charlotte Bronte_: "_Villette._"
+
+                             "See! how shadowy,
+                   Of some occult magician's rearing,
+                 Or swung in space of heaven's grace
+                   Dissolving, dimly reappearing,
+                 Afloat upon ethereal tides
+                 St. Paul's above the city rides."--_John Davidson._
+
+
+St. Paul's is the central object of the City. As the typical view of
+Rome must ever show, not any "purple Caesar's dome," but the violet,
+all-pervading cupola of St. Peter's,--so, also, must the typical view
+of London ever show the faint, misty, grey-blue dome of St. Paul's.
+And St. Paul's is more to us than this. Even to dwellers in the
+West-End, inexperienced in City life, that guardian spirit of the
+mother-church, brooding silently over the far-off, dimly-imagined
+heart of the City, is a vital part--a necessary factor--of London
+life. The mighty smoke-begrimed cathedral, the monument of Wren's
+genius, the abiding angel of the City, has it not a place in the
+inmost affections of every Englishman worthy of the name whether near
+or far? The shrines of other lands, of other nations, may win his
+outspoken admiration; St. Paul's has ever his heart. For this, at
+least, is his inheritance, his very own.
+
+[Illustration: _Fighting Cocks._]
+
+Blue-grey, veiled in mystery when viewed from a distance, St. Paul's,
+seen from its immediate surroundings, has all the wonder of a dramatic
+effect. Suddenly, from the glare and bustle of Cheapside, from the
+tumult of the crowded highway, a gigantic, blackened mass rises in
+startling completeness immediately overhead, towering with almost
+night-mare like rapidity ever higher as we advance. Seen behind the
+tall white buildings and shops of its so-called "churchyard," that hem
+it in, St. Paul's makes an impression that is indescribably grand.
+Especially in spring, when the first tender leaves of its surrounding
+plane-trees interpose their young greenery in delicate labyrinths
+between the dark, massive walls of the cathedral and the ever hurrying
+life outside them, should St. Paul's be visited for the first time.
+
+There has from immemorial times been a church here; tradition even
+suggests a Roman temple on the site. But, though the "spirit" has ever
+been constant, the "letter" (so to speak), has often changed. At any
+rate Wren's masterpiece is the third Christian church, dedicated to
+St. Paul, erected here since early Saxon times. Though Wren's
+life-work was not rewarded, like Milton's, with "twenty pounds paid in
+instalments, and a near approach to death on the gallows," yet he,
+too, had but scant justice in his day. National benefits, even in our
+own time, are often but ill rewarded. Thwarted, wretchedly paid,
+suspected, and finally, at great age, and after forty-five years' hard
+service, deposed from the post he had so long and so ably filled; the
+"Nestor" of his age, with a spirit worthy of a more enlightened time,
+betook himself cheerfully to his old study of philosophy, and only
+once in every year, we are told, indulged his master-passion by having
+himself carried to St. Paul's to gaze in silence on his life-work.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Paul's from the River._]
+
+The highest point of the city would, naturally, from very early times
+be chosen as the sanctuary; and St. Paul's stands grandly on the top
+of Ludgate Hill, its western portico almost facing the steep street of
+that name. That it does not do so more exactly, is due to the haste of
+the people in rebuilding their houses after the Great Fire; such haste
+occasioning the reconstruction of the city more on the old lines, than
+on those of Wren. For the great cathedral took some thirty-five years
+to complete, and streets grow again more quickly than edifices
+destined for the monuments of nations. And, before the new church
+could be begun, the useless ruins of its predecessor had to be
+removed. The Great Fire had calcined its stones and undermined the
+safety of its walls. Such, indeed was the devastation of this terrible
+holocaust, that even to this day, its relics and debris may be traced
+in distinct thin layers, at certain distances under the soil, all over
+the area of the City. The ruin can hardly be imagined, even from
+Pepys's and Evelyn's vivid diaries. Small wonder indeed, that it
+should be thought by the credulous that the end of the world, the Last
+Judgment, had truly come. Some, later, held that the "purification" of
+the old church by fire had been the one thing needed after its
+desecration in the Commonwealth times to a house of traffic and
+merchandize, even sometimes to a stable. The church had become a mere
+promenade; "Paul's Walkers" had been the names given to loungers in
+the sacred edifice; gallants using it as a place of pastime, beggars
+as a resting-place, and Inigo Jones's beautiful portico at the west
+end being all built up with squalid shops. The people were gradually
+awakening to a sense of these enormities: had cleared out those unholy
+traffickers;--were, indeed, in process of restoring the church,--when,
+in 1666, the fire came to complete the purification. Then, when the
+destruction of the city was complete, the common people with one
+accord, pronounced it to be the work of the "Popish faction," and not
+content with the mere verbal condemnation, caused this accusation of
+incendiarism to be graven deeply on Wren's commemorating monument, a
+calumny only removed after the lapse of ages.
+
+Old St. Paul's, the second church of that name on this site, had been
+built in the Conqueror's time; it was a large Gothic building, a vista
+of noble arches, 700 feet long, with a tall spire, which was
+subsequently struck by lightning and removed. It had a twelve-bayed
+nave and a twelve-bayed choir, with a fine wheel-window at the east
+end, and with two smaller satellites, St. Faith and St. Gregory,--the
+one inside its very walls,--the other built on to it outside. On being
+called upon to rebuild from the very foundations, Wren "resolved to
+reconcile as near as possible the Gothic with a better manner of
+architecture;" and, without ever having seen St. Peter's, he produced
+what is really an adaptation of that central Renaissance building of
+Christianity. It is much smaller: St. Paul's could go easily inside
+St. Peter's; yet, in the position it occupies, hemmed in by streets
+and houses, it looks deceptively much bigger. There is a pleasant
+story told, that in the beginning of its building, Wren sent a workman
+to fetch from the surrounding debris, a stone wherewith to mark out
+the centre of the dome; and this happening to be an old gravestone,
+inscribed "Resurgam," it was held to be a happy omen. (The word
+"Resurgam," over the north portico, with a phoenix, by Cibber,
+commemorates this story.) Wren was very careful about the strength of
+his foundations; "I build for eternity," he said, with the true
+confidence of genius.
+
+More than two centuries have now elapsed since the first opening of
+the new St. Paul's for service, and these two centuries have
+established, as time alone can do, the fame and the genius of Wren.
+Time here, as ever, has delivered the final verdict. The great
+cathedral dominates the City, harmonising, ennobling, purifying the
+serried mass of its surroundings; it is the coping-stone of London's
+greatness. The verdict of later times has done justice to Wren's
+judgment, and many of his intentions regarding the details of the
+edifice, thwarted in his lifetime by ignorant contemporaries, have now
+been carried out. Thus, the organ has been moved from its former place
+over the iron-wrought screen between choir and nave, (where it marred
+the architectural effect of the edifice), to the north-east arch of
+the choir, the position originally planned for it by Wren; the tall
+outside railing of the churchyard, which, Wren said, dwarfed the base
+of the cathedral, has been removed; the mosaics he asked for now
+incrust, in shining glory, the central dome; and, if the grand
+"baldacchino" he wanted has not been placed in the choir, there is,
+instead, a very sumptuous modern reredos. The balustrade that
+surmounts the main building was not intended by Wren, but insisted on
+by the Commissioners for the building; and its erection caused Wren to
+say, not, perhaps, without sly intention: "I never designed a
+balustrade; but _ladies think nothing well without an edging_."
+
+This, however, was long ago; Wren sleeps in peace in his cathedral
+crypt; and there, on the top of Ludgate Hill, St. Paul's stands,
+blackening ever, year by year, yet gaining immeasurably through that
+very blackness. It has been said, wittily, that the great church has a
+special claim to its livery of smoke, for the reason that a great part
+of the cost of its building was defrayed by a tax on all coals brought
+into the port of London! And this canopy of solemn black, out of which
+the dome, lantern, and golden ball emerge at intervals, in silver and
+gold, becomes it well.
+
+     "There cannot," wrote Hawthorne, "be anything else in its
+     way so good in the world as just this effect of St. Paul's
+     in the very heart and densest tumult of London. It is much
+     better than staring white; the edifice would not be nearly
+     so grand without this drapery of black."
+
+The ancient monuments of St. Paul's were nearly altogether destroyed
+with the old church; Wren's cathedral was inaccessible to any new
+monuments for some years, the first admitted to it being that of John
+Howard the philanthropist in 1790. This was followed by many others,
+chiefly of great warriors, soldiers and sailors; although
+ecclesiastics also are numerous, and there is a goodly company of
+painters.
+
+     "If Westminster Abbey," said C. R. Leslie, "has its _Poets'
+     Corner_, so has St. Paul's its _Painters' Corner_. Sir
+     Joshua Reynolds's statue, by Flaxman, is here, and Reynolds
+     himself lies buried here; and Barry, and Opie, and Lawrence
+     are around him; and, above all, the ashes of the great Van
+     Dyck are in the earth under the cathedral."
+
+Turner now lies next to Reynolds. Yet, as a rule, the great
+commemorated in St. Paul's are of a different type to those of
+Westminster. Both churches are the mausoleums of heroes; St. Paul's
+being, however, by common consent the resting-place of the Militant,
+Westminster of the Pacific. The statue of Dr. Johnson, under the dome,
+opposes that of Howard. Though his dust rests in Westminster Abbey,
+the militant spirit of the Sage well deserves commemoration in St.
+Paul's. His representation, in the curious art of the time, as a
+half-clothed muscular athlete, is appropriately supplemented by that
+of Howard, bare-legged, with Roman toga and tunic. The coincidence of
+Johnson holding a scroll, and Howard a prison key, has caused the two
+to be sometimes mistaken by visitors for St. Peter and St. Paul! But
+not all the monumental vagaries are as innocuous as these. Westminster
+Abbey does not alone suffer from the bad taste of the Renaissance; a
+few of the monuments of St. Paul's are alike trials to the eyes as to
+the faith. The naked warriors in sandals, receiving swords from, or
+falling into the arms of, smart feminine "Victories,"--_lusus naturae_
+with wings protruding from their shoulders,--are, indeed, sad
+instances of the too rampant eighteenth-century exuberance of fancy.
+Of the monuments, for instance, to Captains Burgess and Westcott,
+Allan Cunningham remarks:
+
+     "The two naval officers (Westcott and Burgess), are naked,
+     which destroys historic probability; it cannot be a
+     representation of what happened, for no British warriors go
+     naked into battle, or wear sandals or Asiatic mantles....
+     When churchmen declared themselves satisfied, the ladies
+     thought they might venture to draw near, but the flutter of
+     fans and the averting of faces was prodigious. That Victory,
+     a modest and well-draped dame, should approach an undrest
+     dying man, and crown him with laurel, might be endured--but,
+     how a well-dressed young lady could think of presenting a
+     sword to a naked gentleman went far beyond all their notions
+     of propriety."
+
+Neither is the ugly group of the Bishop of Calcutta, ogre-like in
+size, apparently confirming two Indian dwarfs, at all calculated to
+excite any feeling but amusement.
+
+The great cathedral has, nevertheless, also its monumental treasures.
+Under the third arch on the north of the nave, is the noble monument
+of the Duke of Wellington, by Alfred Stevens; the aged Duke lying,
+"like a Scaliger of Verona, deeply sleeping upon a lofty bronze
+sarcophagus." One thinks of Tennyson's lines:
+
+  "Here in streaming London's central roar,
+   Let the sound of those he wrought for,
+   And the feet of those he fought for,
+   Echo round his bones for evermore."
+
+And near to him, in the north aisle of the nave, under the tattered
+banners of those old regiments that fell in the Crimea, lies, on a
+pedestal of Greek cipollino, the recumbent bronze effigy of that
+recent recruit to the ranks of dead painters, Lord Leighton of
+Stretton. The monument, worthy of the best traditions of art, is by
+Brock. The beautiful features of the dead President are composed in a
+sublime peace; he "is not dead, but sleepeth"; "yet it is visibly a
+sleep that shall know no ending, till the last day break, and the last
+shadow flee away." The long robe droops to the feet, the hands that
+toiled unweariedly for beauty and for immortal art, now lie motionless
+on the breast. The tattered flags that hang above, have, here, too,
+their significance,--hanging over one, who in the many-sidedness of
+his genius and his interests, was in his time one of the pioneers of
+the Volunteer movement. The Leonardo of his age has here a fitting
+memorial.
+
+Near to Lord Leighton's fine tomb is that of General Gordon, a bronze
+monument and effigy by Boehm. He "who at all times, and everywhere,
+gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his sympathy
+to the suffering, and his heart to God" is fitly remembered in death.
+When I last saw this monument, on the hero's breast lay a fresh bunch
+of violets, on his either side were the symbolic palm branches, and at
+his feet a wreath of white flowers. Near by is the imposing bronze
+doorway, the "gate of the tomb," erected to Lord Melbourne, Queen
+Victoria's first Prime Minister. Of the supporting angels on either
+side of the plinth, that on the left, especially, is very impressive.
+
+But the bell calls to service, and the rolling organ-tones resound in
+the blue dome, where Richmond's mosaics glitter like diamonds in the
+stray gleams of sunshine that glance athwart the abyss. The mosaics,
+like all innovations in this ungrateful city, have, of course, run the
+gauntlet of abuse, on the ground of smallness and ineffectiveness; yet
+the Monreale mosaics, so admired at Palermo, are more or less on the
+same scale, and are, also, at a considerable height. But it is
+difficult for contemporaries to judge fairly, and Time, no doubt, here
+as elsewhere, will kindly do the work of discrimination for us.
+
+In the crypt are the half-destroyed remains of monuments from the
+older church, with Nelson's sarcophagus, Wren's simple tomb, and many
+others. But, outside St. Paul's, the sunlight still calls us, and,
+from the depths of the dim recesses and aisles of the great cathedral,
+we regain now the brilliant summit of Ludgate Hill, brilliant with the
+noonday spring sun. Now the sounds of many-sided life invade the
+repose of death; and a noisy street-organ, playing near Queen Anne's
+statue, mingles its note strangely with the cathedral's still pealing
+bells. The pigeons, gay in colour, flit down from their homes in among
+the blackened garlands, Corinthian capitals, and pediments; it is a
+strange and a motley scene. And, down at the bottom of the great
+flight of steps that lead from the western portico, the
+Twentieth-century visitor will now see a new landmark; for here, cut
+deeply into the pavement, is the record of the latest great ceremonial
+function of St. Paul's: Queen Victoria's visit here on the sixtieth
+anniversary of her reign. Here, on this very spot, surrounded by
+Archbishops, priests, and people, the royal and aged lady sat in her
+carriage, paying homage to a Heavenly Throne, and receiving, surely,
+greater homage than was ever before paid to an earthly one:--
+
+     "On a lovely June morning, in the year 1897, a wondrous
+     pageant moved through the enchanted streets of London.
+     Squadron by squadron, and battery by battery, a superb
+     cavalry and artillery went by--the symbol of the fighting
+     strength of the United Kingdom. There went by also troops of
+     mounted men, more carelessly riding and more lightly
+     equipped--those who came from Canada, Australia, New
+     Zealand, and South Africa to give a deeper meaning to the
+     royal triumph; and black-skinned soldiers and yellow, and
+     the fine representatives of the Indian warrior races.
+     Generals and statesmen went by, and a glittering cavalcade
+     of English and Continental princes, and the whole procession
+     was a preparation--for what? A carriage at last, containing
+     a quiet-looking old lady, in dark and simple attire; and at
+     every point where this carriage passed through seven miles
+     of London streets, in rich quarters and poor, a shock of
+     strong emotion shot through the spectators, on pavement and
+     on balcony, at windows and on housetops. They had seen the
+     person in whom not only were vested the ancient kingdoms of
+     England, Scotland, and Ireland, but who was also at once the
+     symbol and the actual bond of union of the greatest and most
+     diversified of secular empires."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: _Imperium et Libertas_, by Bernard Holland.]
+
+The inscription, cut, with Roman simplicity, into the broad
+paving-stone, runs thus:
+
+  HERE QUEEN VICTORIA
+  RETURNED THANKS TO
+  ALMIGHTY GOD FOR THE
+  SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY
+  OF HER ACCESSION.
+               JUNE 22, A.D. 1897.
+
+By how many generations,--for how many centuries,--will these words, I
+wonder, be read,--the distant message of Time from the buried
+Victorian Era?
+
+Beyond, Queen Anne's statue, in flowing curls and a "sacque" robe,
+stands, with some dignity, facing busy Ludgate Hill, and surrounded by
+a circular, prison-like grating. Down towards noisy Fleet Street her
+gaze wanders; down to where the rumble of many wheels, the sound of
+many voices, make a distant murmur like the stormy sea, broken, at
+intervals, by a shriek from that most picturesque of railways, the
+iron "Bridge of Steam," that, ever and anon, emits a puff of smoke and
+a red spark into the general "fermenting-vat," the ingulfing vortex of
+life and energy below. For this is the roaring Niagara of London, the
+loom of Time, that never ceases, that ever fashions Order out of
+Disorder, ever, as by a magician's wand, raises system out of chaos.
+Kings, and even thrones, may "pass to rise no more;" but the busy
+phoenix-heart of London, like the vestals' fire, must ceaselessly
+burn; ever fed, ever renewed, ever immortal, ever young.
+
+     "Lord Tennyson always delighted in the 'central roar' of
+     London. Whenever he and I (says his son) "went to London,
+     one of the first things we did was to walk to the Strand and
+     Fleet Street. 'Instead of the stuccoed houses in the West
+     End, this is the place where I should like to live,' he
+     would say." He was also fond of looking at London from the
+     bridges over the Thames, and of going into St. Paul's, and
+     into the Abbey. One day in 1842 Fitzgerald records a visit
+     to St. Paul's with him when he said, 'Merely as an enclosed
+     space in a huge city this is very fine,' and when they got
+     out into the open, in the midst of the 'central roar,' 'This
+     is the mind; that is a mood of it.'"--(_Tennyson's Life_, i.
+     183.)
+
+[Illustration: _St. Michael's, Paternoster Royal._]
+
+Round about St. Paul's are many and labyrinthine lanes and alleys,
+with no less labyrinthine associations. Some of these alleys are, like
+Paternoster Row, or St. Paul's Churchyard, by day crowded aortas of
+human traffic; others, by strange contrast, are silent and still as
+the grave. London is, as we know, full of unexpected nooks of quiet;
+and none, in their way, are more sudden and startling than those about
+St. Paul's. From busy Paternoster Row, with its array of religious
+book-shops of all denominations,--so crowded, and yet so narrow, that
+a man on one of its sidewalks can, by stretching, almost grasp the
+hand of a man on the other (or could perhaps do so, were it not so
+constantly blocked by multifarious traffic),--from noisy Paternoster
+Row to the calm of "Amen Court,"--the quadrangle of canons' residences
+opening out of it,--what a change! Here, in Amen Court, entered by a
+pleasant, sober red-brick gateway, Canon Liddon's last days were
+spent; here are quiet, old-fashioned houses looking, in summer, on to
+green plots and refreshing shrubs. All this seclusion, and yet the
+very heart of London! Warwick Square, close by, is a haven of another
+sort; a stony square set round with tall offices; roomy houses,
+perhaps formerly residential mansions, with here and there an
+attractively carved antique porch, or other relic of the past. It was
+under a house in this square, in rebuilding, that various Roman
+remains were recently found. In Paternoster Row, at the corner of
+"Chapter-house Court," was, in old days, the "Chapter" Coffee House,
+where the old medical club of the "Wittenagemot" was held, and where,
+later, Charlotte and Anne Bronte came on their first visit to London,
+after the successful publication of _Jane Eyre_, to make their real
+personalities known to their publishers, in 1848. Two little lonely,
+strangely-dressed women they must have seemed!--their only friend the
+elderly waiter of the establishment, who no doubt, took an interest in
+such unusual visitors. Yet, what excitement must they not have felt in
+seeing, for the first time, all that they had read and dreamed of for
+years! One is reminded of the story of their brother Branwell, that
+unhappy child of genius and temptation, who, at lonely Haworth
+Parsonage, knew all "the map of London by heart" without ever having
+been there, and who could direct any chance stranger who happened,
+going Londonwards, to put up at the remote Yorkshire inn.
+
+"Panyer Alley," the last entry leading into Newgate Street,
+commemorates the bakers' basket-makers, or "Panyers," of the
+fourteenth century. Here, built into the wall of a modern house and
+nearly obliterated, was, till quite recently, a relief of a boy
+sitting on a "panyer," with this curious inscription:
+
+  "When Ye have sought
+    The Citty Round
+      Yet still This is
+    The Highest Ground
+      Avgvst the 27
+          1688."
+
+Close by used to be the tavern called "Dolly's Chop-House," removed in
+1883. The views obtained of the Cathedral, down some of these narrow
+byways, are very striking:
+
+     "There is a passage leading from Paternoster Row to St.
+     Paul's Churchyard. It is a slit, through which the Cathedral
+     is seen more grandly than from any other point I can call to
+     mind. It would make a fine dreamy picture, as we saw it one
+     moonlight night, with some belated creatures resting against
+     the walls in the foreground--mere spots set against the base
+     of Wren's mighty work, that, through the narrow opening,
+     seemed to have its cross set against the sky."
+
+The famous open-air pulpit called "Paul's" or "Powle's" Cross--noted
+for so many eloquent and impassioned harangues from mediaeval
+divines,--for the proclamation of kings,--for the denunciation of
+traitors,--used to stand at the north-east corner of the churchyard.
+It was a canopied cross, raised on stone steps; a big elm marked its
+site until some fifty years back. Open-air services, discontinued
+after the demolition of "Paul's Cross," were attempted to be revived
+by Wesley and Whitefield; and, even in our own day, an open-air pulpit
+is used, in summer, at Trinity Church, Marylebone Road, and largely
+attended, as any one who passes by Portland Road Station on Sunday
+afternoon may see for himself. Public confession for crime was also
+made at "Paul's Cross," and Jane Shore did penance here, as described
+by Sir Thomas More. East of St. Paul's, where now a line of tall
+warehouses rises, was, until 1884, St. Paul's School, founded in 1509
+by Dean Colet, friend of Erasmus, and now removed to new red brick
+buildings at Hammersmith; a tablet on one of the warehouses marks its
+site. The old fashioned Deanery of St. Paul's,--a homely building, not
+unlike a quiet country rectory, with red tiled sloping roofs, and
+nearly hidden behind high walls,--is in Dean's Court, just south of
+the cathedral. Close by it is St. Paul's Choristers' School, built in
+1874 by Dean Church.
+
+Returning to the portico of the north transept, it is pleasant to sit
+awhile in St Paul's Churchyard, where the doves coo and the pigeons
+flutter. Or if you stand by the iron gate of the enclosure, and raise
+your eyes to the blackened walls and columns, you will see, above the
+north porch, an inscription on a tablet, perpetuating the memory of
+the great builder, "in four words which comprehend his merit and his
+fame:" "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice." (If thou seekest his
+monument, look around.) "The visitor," says Leigh Hunt, "does look
+around, and the whole interior of the Cathedral ... seems like a
+magnificent vault over his single body." And, gazing, in this sense,
+on the great man's tomb, the burning words of Ecclesiasticus suggest
+themselves, read by the Bishop of Stepney at the unveiling of Lord
+Leighton's monument:
+
+     "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat
+     us. The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his
+     great power from the beginning.... Leaders of the people by
+     their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for
+     the people, wise and eloquent in their instructions.... All
+     these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory
+     of their times. There be of them, that have left a name
+     behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some
+     there lie, which have no memorial ... but ... their glory
+     shall not be blotted out. Their bodies are buried in peace;
+     but their name liveth for evermore."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE TOWER
+
+  _Prince Edward_: "Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord?"
+  _Buckingham_: "He did, my gracious lord, begin that place;
+                      Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified...."
+  _Richard of York_: "What, will you go unto the Tower, my lord?...
+                           ... I shall not sleep in quiet at the Tower."
+  _Gloucester_: "Why, what should you fear?"
+  _Richard of York_: "Marry, my uncle Clarence' angry ghost:
+                          My grandam told me he was murder'd there."
+                              --_King Richard III., Act iii, Scene 1._
+
+     "Death is here associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and
+     Saint Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration
+     and imperishable renown; not with everything that is most
+     endearing in social and domestic charities; but with
+     whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny,
+     with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the
+     inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with
+     all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted
+     fame."--_Macaulay_: "_History of England._"
+
+              "Place of doom,
+  Of execution too, and tomb."--_Scott._
+
+
+What Londoner has not, from earliest childhood, been acquainted with
+the Tower? In the Christmas holidays it presented, as a "treat," rival
+attractions with Madame Tussaud's and the "Zoo." When not presented
+under the too-informing care of over-zealous pastors and
+masters,--when not imbibed as too flagrant material for that
+fly-in-the-ointment, a holiday task,--when not made, in a word, too
+suggestive of the unpleasant, but necessary paths of learning,--it
+offered great fascinations to the youthful mind. The warders, in their
+picturesque "Beefeater" dress, were ever an unfailing joy; the
+surprise, indeed, with which I first saw one of these mighty beings
+descend from his pedestal, and deign to hold simple conversation with
+ordinary mortals, is still fresh in my memory. Then, the towers and
+dark passages, up which one could run and clatter joyfully, with all
+the entrancing and horrid possibility of meeting somebody's headless
+ghost; the attractive thumbscrew, model of the rack, and headsman's
+mask, all so appealing to the innocent brutality of childhood; the
+very wooden and highly coloured "Queen Elizabeth", riding in full
+dress, with a page, to Tilbury Fort; the stiff effigies of the
+mail-clad soldiers, in rows inside the White Tower,--the live soldiers
+drilling in the sun-lit square outside;--the inspiring music of the
+band, the roll of the drum, the flocks of wheeling pigeons; how
+charming it all was! My first knowledge of Tower history was derived
+from a Cockney nursemaid, who had, I suspect, strong affinities with
+the before-mentioned "pretty soldiers" (are not "pretty soldiers,"
+by-the-way, usually the first words that London children learn to
+lisp?). Tragedies, I knew, were connected with that sun-lit square.
+Two beautiful ladies, I was told, had had their heads cut off here by
+their cruel husband, a gentleman called "'Enery the Eighth," (I
+naturally thought of this "'Enery" as Bluebeard); "because they was
+that skittish like, and fond of singin' and dancin' on Sundays, which
+'e for one never could abear; and so 'e 'ad their 'eds orf, and grass
+adn't never grown on the place sence." Which fact I identified as
+true, at least for the time being; though how far grass can grow
+through paving-stones, is always matter for speculation. And Mary-Anne
+further went on to relate how she "'ad a friend who knew a young woman
+who was a 'ousekeeper somewhere here, who 'ad seen 'orrible things in
+the way of ghostisses, and 'ad the screamin' 'sterrics somethin'
+awful;--quite reg'ler, too,--after it!"
+
+[Illustration: _A Beefeater._]
+
+Yet I myself think that it is a pity to treat the classic Tower on
+such familiar terms! It should be approached with respect, and not
+merely introduced as a juvenile appendix to Madame Tussaud's! The
+charm of the old fortress, as of its immediate surroundings, is, in
+any case, only realised in maturer years. This has always been the
+riverside stronghold of London. Tradition, and poetic license, name,
+indeed, Julius Caesar as its founder; however that may be, the Romans
+probably had a fort here, as Saxon Alfred after them. The White Tower,
+or Keep, raised by William the Conqueror, is built upon a Roman
+bastion; and Roman relics have been dug up at intervals in its near
+precincts. Nevertheless, the Roman tradition here is but visionary;
+the interest of the Tower is bound up with the evolution of the
+English race. It is the most interesting mediaeval monument that we
+possess, a still vivid piece of English history; a stranded islet of
+Time, left forgotten by the raging tide of surrounding London.
+
+In the Tower precincts,--if you are careful not to choose a Monday or
+Saturday, which are free days, for your visit--you may enjoy yourself
+in your own way and to your heart's content. The warders,--old
+soldiers,--are pleasant and unobtrusive people, with manners of really
+wonderful urbanity, considering the very mixed, and generally
+unwashed, character, of a large portion of their public. The Tower,
+apart from the charm of its lurid and romantic history, is a
+picturesque place. In winter, it is somewhat exposed to the elements,
+and in summer, owing to its proximity to the Temple of the Fisheries,
+it is perhaps a trifle odoriferous; but on a fine spring or autumn
+morning,--a spring morning uncursed by east wind, an autumn morning
+undimmed by river-mist,--you will realise all the beauty, as well as
+the interest, of the place. Part of its attraction lies in the fact
+that it is neither a ruin nor a fossil; it is a living place still,
+and serves for use as well as for show. In old days by turn palace,
+state prison, inquisition, and "oubliette," it is now a barrack and
+government arsenal. Its threatening ring of walled towers, witnesses
+of so many scenes of blood and cruelty, re-echo now to the merry
+voices of little School-Board boys, playing foot-ball in the drained
+and levelled moat below; its paved courts and gravelled enclosures
+still ring to the tramp of soldiers' feet, but soldiers of a newer and
+a more humane era. In days when men suffered cheerfully for faith's
+sake, when queens and princes passed naturally to the throne through
+the blood of their nearest relations, when self-denial, conscience,
+and uprightness of life were reckoned as crimes, the Tower was the
+place of doom and death. Here, not only political plotters and state
+prisoners, guilty of "high treason," were punished, but also children,
+young men and maidens, playthings of an unkind fate, were condemned,
+unheard, to an early death. Here, also, at the Restoration, perished,
+bravely as they had lived, many of the sturdy and loyal followers of a
+bad cause, who might say, with Macaulay's typical "Jacobite":
+
+  "To my true king I offered, free from stain,
+   Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain."
+
+Later, the martyr annals of the Tower were in a measure defiled by the
+introduction of real and noteworthy criminals, and the imprisonment
+within its walls of such wretches as the Gunpowder Plot conspirators,
+the infamous murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the notorious Judge
+Jeffreys. But the desecration of these is past; the Tower has long
+ceased to be a State Prison, and the halo of its earlier victims still
+is paramount there. The very names of certain localities recall their
+tragedies: "Bloody Tower," commemorating the murder of the young
+princes, sons of Edward IV., whose bones were found here under a
+staircase; Traitor's Gate,--the gate of the doomed,--the grim disused
+archway, with a portcullis, looking towards, and in ancient times
+opening on to, the river.
+
+The Tower is full of lovely "bits" for the sketcher. The succession of
+fine old gates that span the entrance-road, and the ring of encircling
+towers called the "Inner Ward," though necessarily restored in places,
+have still a fine air of antiquity; which air of antiquity the massive
+walls, narrow window-slits, and the close-growing mantle of ivy that,
+in places, adds a welcome note of greenery, do much to maintain. The
+effect, at any rate, is complete. In the Tower precincts you seem to
+be really in mediaeval London. Just so, you imagine, in all essentials,
+only still grassy and not quite so shut in by houses, must "Tower
+Green" have looked on that terrible day so dramatically described by
+Froude:
+
+     "A little before noon, on the 19th of May, Anne Boleyn,
+     Queen of England, was led down to the green where the young
+     grass and the white daisies of summer were freshly bursting
+     in the sunshine. A little cannon stood loaded on the
+     battlements, the motionless cannoneer was ready with smoking
+     linstock at his side, and when the crawling hand upon the
+     dial of the great Tower clock touched the midday hour, that
+     cannon would tell to London that all was over."
+
+On this same spot, so fatal to youth and beauty, two other young
+women,--mere girls, indeed,--died; poor silly Katherine Howard, and,
+later, Lady Jane Grey, a child of eighteen,--the "queen of nine days,"
+a victim of others' offences,--who "went to her death without fear or
+pain." Neither age nor youth were, indeed, spared in those cruel days;
+for the grey hairs of the aged Countess of Salisbury, last of the
+Plantagenets, were here also brought to the same block. This was the
+private execution spot, reserved for special victims and near
+relations, in contrast to the public one on Great Tower Hill outside;
+the exact place is enclosed, and marked by a square patch of darker
+stone. In the little adjoining chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula--the
+Prisoners' Chapel,--aptly dedicated to St. Peter-in-the-Chains,--were
+buried all these poor dishonoured bodies; Queen Anne Boleyn's, so
+short a time ago so loved, so adulated, thrown carelessly into an old
+arrow-chest, and flung beneath the altar. This chapel,--which is, by
+the way, a royal chapel, and therefore under no bishop's
+jurisdiction,--is very much restored, but it has a few good monuments;
+and its list of victims, numbered on a brass tablet inside the door,
+is sufficiently affecting: "In truth," says Macaulay:
+
+     "there is no sadder spot on earth than this little cemetery.
+     Hither have been carried through successive ages, by the
+     rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the
+     bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies,
+     the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the
+     ornaments of courts."
+
+"No, I can't say I've ever seen any ghosts," said the affable Warder
+who showed me the chapel: "though an American family lately, they were
+so anxious to see Queen Anne Boleyn's ghost, that they went and sat
+opposite the execution-spot, at all hours, day-and-night; but they
+must have got disappointed, for I never heard that anything came of
+it.... Being from America," he added thoughtfully, "I suppose they
+felt they'd like to see all there was to be seen.... No, ghosts don't
+trouble us much; we all live in the Towers and round about, and the
+worst you can say of our lodgin's is that they're a bit draughty-like,
+in winter and spring, having them slits of winders all round. And then
+they don't allow you to paper the walls, or stick up a picture nail,
+or anything to make the place look a bit homely! One does get a bit
+tired, too," he confessed, "of them dark stone walls, and even of
+prisoners' inscriptions; but there it is, you mayn't so much as touch
+'em, or even cover 'em up.... However," he continued magnanimously, "I
+own that we're lucky to live in the days we do; our 'eds is our own,
+at any rate!"
+
+Between Tower Green and the outer moat, on the western side of the
+gravelled square, are the old-fashioned and comfortable-looking
+dwelling houses of the Tower officials; the residences of the
+Governor, the doctor, the Chaplain, &c.; houses mainly of darkened
+brick,--like the citadel itself,--fitted in between the "Beauchamp"
+and the "Bell" towers. The greater part of the fortress is, as we have
+seen, utilised as arsenal, barracks, or private dwellings; and thus,
+of its many towers, the "White Tower," (the "Keep" of the ancient
+castle), and the "Beauchamp Tower," are the only ones now viewed by
+the general public; though other antiquities and places worthy of a
+visit may, on application to the Governor, be shown to those "really
+interested." The Beauchamp Tower, though "restored" in 1854 (when all
+its inscriptions were placed together in one room), is still most
+interesting. Certainly, the draughts, on a windy day, of that room, go
+far to suggest the justice of my friend the warder's complaint. And
+the poor prisoners of old days did not know the modern comfort of
+"slow-combustion" stoves! Poor creatures! torn by the rack and
+torture, crushed by long, hopeless imprisonment, with no friend to
+turn to in their need, they have left us, deeply cut into the prison
+walls, their most pathetic complaint. Philosophy, on the whole, seems
+here to have been of the most availing comfort. Like Socrates, the
+wretched victims tried hard to be stoical. "The most unhappie man in
+the world," runs one inscription, "is he that is not pacient in
+adversitie." Then, in old Norman-French: "Tout vient apoient, quy
+peult attendre." "A passage perillus maketh a port pleasant." It was
+here, in the Beauchamp Tower, that the five Dudley brothers, sons of
+the Duke of Northumberland, were imprisoned for their share in the
+Lady Jane Grey rebellion; here are their pictured emblems and
+hieroglyphics; also the word "Jane," supposed to have been cut by her
+husband, Lord Guildford. To the longer victims of the Tower, time must
+have passed hardly. Was it agony of mind that guided the stroke, or
+did they find it some solace in their anguish? Poets, philosophers,
+men of science, all the best and noblest in the land; hours of solace
+after torture, no doubt, were theirs, given by that good Angel who,
+
+  "Brought the wise and great of ancient days
+   To cheer the cell where Raleigh pined alone."
+
+Had they books, journals, writing materials? Probably but rarely.
+There was Raleigh, who spent such a large part of a chequered life in
+prison here, dying here too at last, and writing his "History" with
+admirable stoicism, in the face of death. But Lady Jane Grey,
+imprisoned in the "Brick Tower," had, we know, to inscribe her last
+message to her sister Katherine, on the blank leaves of her Greek
+Testament. What vivid, what painful interest would attach to a "Tower"
+diary, such as Pepys's, in cipher, could one have been written by any
+of these prisoners!
+
+The wonderful collection of historic armour in the imposing "White
+Tower" is, even to those who are not connoisseurs on the subject, of
+great interest and beauty. It is true that there are a great many very
+narrow and steep stone stairs to be climbed; but in the end you are
+duly rewarded for your trouble. The ancient chapel of St. John, at the
+top of the winding stairway, is most strikingly picturesque, and
+especially so on a sunny day, when the light plays among the bare
+stone columns. This "most perfect Norman chapel in England" is
+striking in its unadorned severity of style; and the stilted horseshoe
+arches of its apse are somewhat like those of St. Bartholomew the
+Great, at Smithfield. The chapel dates from the year 1078, and has
+been the scene of many royal pageants and lyings-in-state. The
+Banqueting Hall adjoins it; here are to be seen, among other
+curiosities, models of the rack and thumbscrew, and the block used for
+the execution of old Lord Lovat, with Lords Balmerino and
+Kilmarnock--the last Royalists executed here--in 1745. The hall
+contains also much armour and many weapons. Above is the "Council
+Chamber," where King Richard II. abdicated his throne in favour of his
+cousin Henry Bolingbroke.
+
+"I think men must really have got bigger since these old days,"
+remarked a burly policeman, to whom I was communicating my
+impressions: "Now, you wouldn't think it, but there's only two suits
+of armour in the whole place that I could even manage to get on me,
+that's old Henry VIII.'s, and his brother-in-law what's beside 'im,
+Charles Brandon, Dook o' Suffolk--you see 'em? over there, in the
+middle. Not but what they must have been strong too, of their size, to
+bear all that there weight of steel on 'em. I'd be sorry to do it
+myself, I know that. It's a wonder they didn't faint, and their poor
+horses, too!"
+
+One of the most beautiful pieces of armour in the collection is that
+made for Henry VIII. on his marriage with Katharine of Arragon. It is
+of German manufacture, with deep and heavy skirts, on the edge of
+which is a pierced border, with the initials "H" and "K" entwined in a
+true-love knot. This suit of armour is, further, adorned with
+elaborate designs, probably from Hans Burgmair or one of his school,
+from the lives of St. George and St. Barbara, patron saints of England
+and of armourers. In Stuart times the suits of mail, and armour
+generally, became less heavy; and vizors and breastplates are often of
+open-work; most picturesque of all, perhaps, is the dress of the
+link-bearers of Charles I.'s time. The armour, and arms generally, are
+kept in a fine state of polish, wonderful to see in a land of fog and
+river mist. "The soldiers, you see, they have a turn at the spears and
+things when they want a job; but, of course, the armour, and such as
+that, is left to two or three people's special business."
+
+There is a certain barbaric splendour about the State vessels and
+Coronation jewels, commonly called the "Regalia," kept in the "Record"
+or "Wakefield" Tower. These, like the menagerie formerly exhibited
+here are separated (and quite as necessarily) from the outer world by
+strong railings. This shining treasure of gold-plate and precious
+stones recalls the story of Colonel Blood's famous and nearly
+successful attempt at robbery, in the time of Charles II., for which
+he was, somewhat inconsistently, rewarded by a landed estate and "cash
+down." History is a sad series of injustices, and Colonel Blood's
+crime was, for reasons of state possibly, suppressed. Certain it is
+that the kings of England have not always been above stealing, or, at
+any rate, pledging their own treasure.
+
+If the Tower looks a grim enough fortress now, it must have seemed
+grimmer still in ancient times, when every murder and cruelty--every
+crime that blackens the page of English history--took place within
+its gloomy walls. Surely, in old days, the bloody reputation of the
+Tower may well have made those shrink and tremble who passed under its
+doomed gateways! By the "Traitor's Gate," that waterway now disused,
+but which then opened directly on to the river highway, was brought
+that living freight of illustrious persons destined here to suffer and
+to die:
+
+  "That gate misnamed, through which before
+   Went Sidney, Russell, Raleigh, Cranmer, More."
+
+So far, indeed, from being a "traitor's" way, all the valour and
+chivalry of mediaeval England seem, at one time and another, to have
+passed that dreadful gate. Here, the "Lieutenant" or "Constable" of
+the Tower, "receipted" the arrival of the yet living bodies of men and
+women, soon to be bleeding and dismembered corpses.... Such a
+"receipt," given for the person of the condemned Duke of Monmouth,
+"the people's darling," is still extant. The "Traitor's Gate" had,
+moreover, an added horror; for in its walls are certain loopholes,
+through which the Lieutenant of the Tower could watch, unseen, the
+prisoner's arrival from his trial at the House of Lord's, and could
+ascertain, as he ascended the stone steps, whether the fatal Axe of
+Office, carried in front of him, were reversed or otherwise--reversal
+signifying death. Here, when Sir Thomas More was being led back to
+prison with the reversed axe carried before him, his beloved daughter
+Margaret burst through the guarding soldiers and embraced him,
+beseeching his blessing--a scene that melted even those stern guards
+to tears.
+
+Brutal, indeed, were the age and the time. If Plantagenets, Yorkists,
+and Lancastrians were frankly murderous, Tudors and Stuarts had more
+refinement of cruelty, dignifying it, more or less, under the name of
+law. The accession of each fresh sovereign was the signal for arrests,
+life-long imprisonments, and executions. Favourites, now deposed from
+favour, paid here the penalty for a few years of feverish greatness;
+here suffered not only men of unscrupulous self-seeking, but also
+those whose chief fault was, like Caesar's, ambition, and who were
+condemned to answer for it as grievously as Caesar. Nor did past
+affliction teach present mercy. The Princess Elizabeth narrowly
+herself escaped a tragic fate in early youth; yet her former
+imprisonment in the "Bell" Tower made her scarcely less cruel, in the
+after-time, to her real or imaginary enemies. Partly in self-defence,
+partly as a question of faith, partly in revenge, both rivals, and
+also those suspected of possible rivalry, were effectually suppressed.
+Even continuation of the hated race of rivals seemed prohibited. Thus,
+Lady Jane Grey's poor sister, Katherine, was imprisoned till her death
+for the crime of secret marriage with the Earl of Hertford; Thomas
+Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was executed for having aspired to the hand
+of the Queen of Scots; Lady Arabella Stuart, James I.'s unhappy
+cousin, having married, "with the love that laughs at privy councils,"
+Sir William Seymour, was caught while escaping with him through Calais
+Roads, and languished here for four years, till her mind left her, and
+she died. The elder D'Israeli tells the story:
+
+     "What passed in that dreadful imprisonment cannot perhaps be
+     recovered for authentic history; but enough is known, that
+     her mind grew impaired, that she finally lost her reason;
+     and if the duration of her imprisonment (four years) was
+     short, it was only terminated by her death. Some loose
+     effusions, often begun and never ended, written and erased,
+     incoherent and rational, yet remain in the fragments of her
+     papers. In a letter she proposed addressing to Viscount
+     Fenton, to implore for her his Majesty's favour again, she
+     says, 'Good my lord, consider the fault cannot be
+     uncommitted; neither can any more be required of any earthly
+     creature but confession and most humble submission.' In a
+     paragraph she had written, but crossed out, it seems that a
+     present of her work had been refused by the king, and that
+     she had no one about her whom she might trust."
+
+Of the few stories of escapes from the Tower, none is more romantic
+than that of Lord Nithsdale, saved by his wife's devotion. Failing to
+obtain a pardon from King George I. she, in her love and despair,
+bethought herself of a desperate plan. Under the pretence of a last
+visit, and with the connivance of a faithful servant, she managed to
+disguise her husband as her Welsh maid, and got him past the Tower
+sentries into safety; the next morning he would have perished with
+Lord Derwentwater, "the pride of the North," and the rest of the
+Scotch Jacobites.
+
+Yet the Tower, even in mediaeval times, was not all tragedy; for here,
+from Henry III.'s era, a royal menagerie was kept,--a menagerie of
+which the famous "Tower Lions," that existed here up to 1853, were the
+eventual outcome. (From the Tower Lions comes originally the phrase,
+"to see the Lions," or the sights, of a place.) The beasts are still
+commemorated in the Tower by the "Lions' Gate,"--or principal
+entrance. The Tower Moat, the broad ditch that encircled the building,
+and added to its mediaeval impregnability, was drained in 1843, and its
+banks are now planted, on the north-east, with a pleasant shrubbery;
+through which winds a foot-path with comfortable seats and delightful
+views, much enjoyed and appreciated by the very poor. Thus, the old
+age of the Tower,--Julius Caesar's traditional fortress, and the scene
+of England's darkest national crimes,--is, as often that of Man
+himself, full of benevolence and serenity. Its brutal youth, its
+sanguinary middle life, are alike far behind it; and "that which
+should accompany old age, as honour, love, and troops of friends," it
+may now look to have. And the long roll of the Tower victims, lying,
+many of them, in nameless graves, their very bones sometimes
+uncoffined; these have at any rate, by their death often achieved an
+immortality greater than any they could ever have gained by their
+lives. They were, in a sense, as was that old Roman, Marcus Curtius,
+sacrifices to their country's gods; for by such throes as overthrew
+them, have all nations reached peace and salvation. "I see," they
+might, like Sydney Carton, have cried prophetically at the block,
+
+     "I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from
+     this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in
+     triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the
+     evil of this time and of the previous time ... gradually
+     making expiation for itself."
+
+Once outside the Tower precincts, all is changed, and you are, again,
+in the bustle and the din of modern London. "Great Tower Hill," on the
+rising ground north of the Tower, and close to Mark Lane Station, is
+hardly an idyllic spot, or one at all suitable to meditation, being
+generally much invaded by the shouts of draymen and the rumble of
+van-wheels. Close by, in Trinity Square gardens, marked by a stone, is
+the spot which for some centuries shared with "Tyburn" the honour, or
+dishonour, of being the public execution-place; but, while Great Tower
+Hill was mostly the last bourne of political and state prisoners,
+Tyburn (the present "Marble Arch"), was reserved for common murderers,
+robbers, and their like. England, in those days, must have enjoyed
+rare galas in the way of executions! Of that old rogue, Lord Lovat,
+beheaded here in 1747, it is recorded, that just before the fatal axe
+fell, a scaffolding, containing some thousand persons, set there to
+enjoy the spectacle, collapsed, killing twelve of them; a sight at
+which, the old man, even at that terrible moment, chuckled merrily,
+"enjoying, no doubt, the downfall of so many Whigs."
+
+Trinity Square has still a pleasant, old-fashioned air of seclusion;
+although all around and about it are grimy lanes and warehouses,
+suggesting the close proximity of wharves and docks. Yet Trinity
+Square, like Charterhouse Square, is no longer residential; the look
+of "home," of comfortable family life, about its sober brick houses,
+is merely a hollow sham; they are mainly offices. Near by is the Royal
+Mint, "where," so Mark Tapley informed his American friends, "the
+Queen lives, to take care of all the money." At the end of the big,
+noisy street called the Minories, leading from the Tower to Aldgate,
+rises the tall, black, three-storied spire of St. Botolph's Church,
+built by Dance in 1744, on an old site. This church is hardly
+beautiful in itself; yet its effect, as seen from the Minories, is
+good. The jurisdiction of St. Botolph, always a popular London saint,
+is now extended to the tiny Church of Holy Trinity, in the Minories, a
+small yellowish building, somewhat like St. Ethelburga in Bishopsgate
+Street, with the same kind of abbreviated turret. When you have
+succeeded in finding this church (which is difficult, as it is hidden
+down a side street off the Minories, and, as usual in London, no
+single inhabitant appears to know where it is), you then usually find
+it locked, with a saddening notice to the effect that the keys are in
+some equally unknown and distant region. Yet you must not despair.
+Such drawbacks are inseparable from the pursuit of historical
+antiquities in London. It seems, however, a pity to have recently
+changed the identity of this small church, thus rendering it still
+more difficult to find. Originally, it gave its name to the whole
+district; having belonged to an abbey of "Minoresses," or nuns of the
+order of St. Clare; the living, and also the name, are amalgamated
+with that of St. Botolph, Aldgate, which now possesses also its chief
+claim to fame. For, though the little church still possesses some good
+monuments, the relic formerly shown here, the dessicated head of a
+man, said to be the Duke of Suffolk, father of Lady Jane Grey, is now
+removed to the larger church. The decapitated head is certainly
+sufficiently ghastly, with the neck still showing the usual first
+stroke of the bungling executioner, and the loose teeth, yellow skin,
+and mouth with "the curve of agony" to which attention is usually
+drawn. The evidence for the head being that of the Duke of Suffolk
+rests mainly on the fact that the Church of "Holy Trinity" was the
+chapel of the Duke of Suffolk's town-house, and the place whither his
+head would naturally be brought after decapitation on Tower-hill.
+
+At No. 9, Minories, over the shop of one John Owen, nautical
+instrument-maker, is the figure of the "Little Midshipman," described
+by Dickens in _Dombey and Son_. But it is difficult to walk in the
+Minories; everywhere crates and cranes seem to threaten you, and paper
+from printing offices bristles from windows on to your devoted
+head.... This must always have been a noisy quarter. In old days it
+was famous for its gunsmiths, as witness Congreve's lines:
+
+  "The mulcibers who in the Minories sweat,
+   And massive bars on stubborn anvils beat--"
+
+You leave the Minories without regret, and turn your face again
+Citywards. The church of All Hallows, Barking (so called from the nuns
+of old Barking Abbey), is further west, in Great Tower Street, close
+to the Tower precincts. It is another church that escaped the Great
+Fire, and it contains the graves of some of the Tower victims. It has
+also some good monumental brasses, one especially, of fine Flemish
+workmanship, in the pavement in the centre of the nave. These old City
+churches are now most of them well served and tended, the Sunday
+services in some of them being much sought after. They are also
+probably kept in better repair than in Dickens's time, when,
+overgrown, dirty, and isolated in the midst of traffic and bustle,
+they struck the novelist only with their weird desolation,--a
+desolation as of some sentient and human thing. Thus vividly he
+described his feelings while attending service in one of them:
+
+     "There is a pale heap of books in the corner of my pew, and
+     while the organ, which is hoarse and sleepy, plays in such
+     fashion that I can hear more of the rusty working of the
+     stops than of any music, I look at the books, which are
+     mostly bound in faded baize and stuff. They belonged, in
+     1754, to the Dowgate family; and who were they? Jane Comport
+     must have married Young Dowgate, and come into the family
+     that way; Young Dowgate was courting Jane Comport when he
+     gave her her prayer-book, and recorded the presentation on
+     the fly-leaf. If Jane were fond of Young Dowgate, why did
+     she die and leave the book here? Perhaps at the rickety
+     altar, and before the damp commandments, she, Comport, had
+     taken him, Dowgate, in a flush of youthful hope and joy, and
+     perhaps it had not turned out in the long run as great a
+     success as was expected.
+
+     "The opening of the service recalls my wandering
+     thoughts.... I find that I have been taking a kind of
+     invisible snuff ... I wink, sneeze and cough ... snuff made
+     of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth and
+     something else ... the decay of dead citizens.... Dead
+     citizens stick on the walls and lie pulverised on the
+     sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and, when a gust
+     of air comes, tumble down upon him."
+
+And, further, with regard to the surrounding bustle and merchandise in
+the busy streets:
+
+     "In the churches about Mark Lane there was a dry whiff of
+     wheat; and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley
+     out of an aged hassock in one of them. From Rood Lane to
+     Tower Street, and thereabouts, there was often a subtle
+     flavour of wine,--sometimes of tea. One church, near Mincing
+     Lane, smelt like a druggist's drawer. Behind the Monument,
+     the service had a flavour of damaged oranges, which, a
+     little farther down towards the river, tempered into
+     herrings, and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of
+     fish. In one church, the exact counterpart of the church in
+     the _Rake's Progress_, where the hero is being married to
+     the horrible old lady, there was no specialty of atmosphere,
+     until the organ shook a perfume of hides all over us from
+     some adjacent warehouse."
+
+(The church depicted in Hogarth's _Rake's Progress_ was, however, the
+older church of St. Marylebone, now rebuilt.)
+
+The next turning on the right from Great Tower Street is Seething
+Lane, leading to Hart Street, noted principally for that ancient
+church of St. Olave that was one of the Great Fire's few survivals.
+Its little churchyard opens on to the muddy, narrow alley called
+Seething Lane, by a picturesque gateway, grimly decorated with carven
+skulls; tradition says in the memory of the many plague victims buried
+here. Indeed it is a grisly monument of the time when the plague-cart
+rumbled in the streets, when a red cross marked the infected houses,
+and when the stones echoed to the hoarse and terrible cry, "Bring out
+your dead!" Perhaps Seething Lane was less muddy and slummy in Samuel
+Pepys's time; for that authority lived here, in a house "adjoining the
+Navy Office," where he held the position of "Clerk of the Acts,"--and
+surely he was nothing if not fussy. The locality, owing to the
+successive distractions of Plague and Fire, cannot have been exactly
+peaceful. In his "Diary" entry for January 30th, 1665-6, Pepys says:
+
+     "It frighted me indeed to go through the church, more than I
+     thought it could have done, to see so many graves lie so
+     high upon the churchyard where people have been buried of
+     the Plague. I was much troubled at it, and do not think to
+     go through it again a good while."
+
+The quaint names of old London churches are very attractive. This St.
+Olave, or Olaf, was a favourite saint of ancient London; he was an
+eleventh-century Scandinavian king, canonised because of his zealous
+propagation of Christianity among his people. Three other London
+churches, in Southwark, Jewry, and Silver Street (the last two no
+longer existing), were called after him. The immediate purlieus of St.
+Olave's, Hart Street, are not exactly savoury, its proximity to the
+river traffic and warehouses making it occasionally somewhat
+odoriferous as well as muddy; it were better, therefore, to choose a
+fine, dry day for this excursion. It is not always easy to get inside
+the church; on week-days, the street seems to be more or less of a
+stagnant back-water; and should your fate compel you to find St.
+Olave's locked, you may stand and knock all day, but nobody will heed
+you; or, if they do heed, will probably put you down as a wandering
+lunatic. Nevertheless, St. Olave's should be visited; for its
+monuments are many and interesting. Samuel Pepys, as parishioner and
+near neighbour, used to attend service here, with his pretty wife; and
+Mrs. Pepys's bust, in white marble, erected by her husband, stands on
+the north side of the chancel, above her tablet and long epitaph. Poor
+Elizabeth Pepys! She was only twenty-nine when she died, and that
+long, artificial Latin screed seems all too long and laboured for her
+lovely and poetic youth. Perhaps her husband, whose pew faces the
+monument, liked during his long widowhood to gaze at that charming
+memorial, and--who knows?--to enjoy his fine Latin composition. Pepys
+himself was buried here later; his own monument, however, only dates
+from 1883, when it was raised by public subscription.
+
+In St. Olave's church occurs that curious and often-quoted epitaph of
+1584, inscribed to "John Orgene and Ellyne, his wife":
+
+  "As I was, so be ye;
+   As I am, you shall be;
+   That I gave, that I have;
+   That I spent, that I had;
+   Thus I ende all my coste,
+   That I lefte, that I loste."
+
+Wandering along Great Tower Street,--and Eastcheap, reminiscent of
+Falstaff and Dame Quickly,--we reach the ever-fishy region of the
+Monument. The Monument is so tall that it is difficult to see it;
+indeed, I cannot tell exactly why the Monument seems always as
+difficult of discovery as the middle of a maze; you seem continually
+close upon it, and yet you hardly ever reach it. No one can ever
+direct the pedestrian to it; though this, indeed, may not be the fault
+of the Monument, but simply because the average Londoner never does
+know anything about the immediate neighbourhood he inhabits. He has
+even been known to live in the next street to the British Museum for
+years, and then be ignorant that such an institution exists. Such
+superiority to external facts is, no doubt, noble; but it has its
+drawbacks. And sometimes the individuals questioned take refuge in a
+crushing silence. The last time, indeed, that I myself visited the
+Monument, I inquired politely of two fishy youths in turn of its
+whereabouts, and received no answer. Possibly this was merely their
+courteous way of informing me that they were really too busy to attend
+to such trivialities. To return, however, to the deluding Monument:
+Dickens, it is true, in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ makes Mr. Tom Pinch and
+Miss Pecksniff find their way thither (Tom, having lost his way, very
+naturally finds himself at the Monument):
+
+     "The Man in the Monument was quite as mysterious a being to
+     Tom as the Man in the Moon. It immediately occurred to him
+     that the lonely creature who held himself aloof from all
+     mankind in that pillar, like some old hermit, was the very
+     man of whom to ask his way.... If Truth didn't live in the
+     base of the Monument, notwithstanding Pope's couplet about
+     the outside of it, where in London was she likely to be
+     found?
+
+     "Coming close below the pillar, it was a great encouragement
+     to Tom to find that the Man in the Monument had simple
+     tastes; that stony and artificial as his residence was, he
+     still preserved some rustic recollections; that he liked
+     plants, hung up bird-cages, was not wholly cut off from
+     fresh groundsel, and kept young trees in tubs. The Man in
+     the Monument was sitting outside his own door, the Monument
+     door; and was actually yawning, as if there were no Monument
+     to stop his mouth, and give him a perpetual interest in his
+     own existence.... Two people came to see the Monument, a
+     gentleman and lady; and the gentleman said, 'How much
+     a-piece?'
+
+     "The Man in the Monument replied, 'A Tanner.'
+
+     "It seemed a low expression, compared with the Monument.
+
+     "The gentleman put a shilling into his hand, and the Man in
+     the Monument opened a dark little door. When the gentleman
+     and lady had passed out of view, he shut it again, and came
+     slowly back to his chair.
+
+     "He sat down and laughed.
+
+     "'They don't know what a many steps there is!' he said.
+     'It's worth twice the money to stop here. Oh, my eye!'
+
+     "The Man in the Monument was a Cynic...."
+
+The charge for the Monument is (I may remark _en passant_), now
+changed from a "tanner" to the humble threepence. (Its summit gallery
+is now closed in, because of the disagreeable mania for committing
+suicide from it.) The original inscription on its pedestal, now
+effaced, was a curious relic of religious intolerance; showing, by its
+absurd reference to the "horrid plott" of "the Popish factio," the
+barbarous and primitive state of popular feeling as late as 1681.
+Wherefore it was that, as Pope said:
+
+  "... London's Column, pointing to the skies,
+   Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies."
+
+One must not, however, forget that this attempt to attribute the dire
+calamity to private malice must have been infinitely comforting to
+the public mind, that ever, even in our own enlightened day, needs a
+scapegoat. In still older days, the scapegoats took a more
+conveniently personal form, and were usually, as we have seen, brought
+to the block on Great Tower Hill: which was, of course, a much simpler
+mode of dealing with them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SOUTHWARK, OLD AND NEW
+
+     "The Thames marks the sharp division between what Lord
+     Beaconsfield called 'the two nations.' On one side we have
+     our nearest English approach to architectural magnificence;
+     on the other there is a long perspective of squalid
+     buildings--smoke-begrimed, half-ruinous, and yet not
+     altogether unlovely."--_Magazine of Art_, January, 1884.
+
+  "Befel, that in that season, on a day
+   In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay,
+   Ready to wenden on my pilgrimage
+   To Canterbury with ful devout courage,
+   At night was come into that hostelry
+   Well nine-and-twenty in a company
+   Of sundry folk, by adventure y-fall
+   In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all,
+   That toward Canterbury woulden ride."
+                          --_Chaucer: Canterbury Tales._
+
+
+Near to the fishy and noisy purlieus of the "Monument," London Bridge
+crosses the river into Southwark.
+
+London Bridge is the terminus for big ships; from its parapet is seen,
+as far as the misty Tower Bridge, a vast city of masts, sails, and
+wharves. Big steamers often make this their starting-point for
+excursions, and sails of Venetian colour charm the eye. In cold
+winters the sea-gulls, flying hither in myriads from the icy North
+Seas, come to the Londoner's call, sure of food and welcome, filling
+grey sky and silvery river with an ever-changing constellation of
+white wings; "a blaze of comet splendour." Wild birds, like children,
+know their friends. The sea-gull's wide, downward swoop, so powerful
+and so graceful, may be watched here in January from early morn to
+dusk; the creatures, poised in serried ranks on the barges and stone
+piers, are just as much at home here as on their own northern
+pinnacles, and after long sojourn, they become so tame that they will
+almost feed from the stranger's hand. It is only, however, during the
+severe weather that the sea-gulls' visit lasts; with the first warm
+February days they are off again, speeding down the river to their
+native haunts.
+
+Close to the foot of London Bridge, on the Southwark side, is the fine
+cruciform church of St. Saviour's, lately restored on the lines of the
+ancient edifice. This church, which had formerly been much mutilated
+by careless and tasteless "restorers," was in long past times the
+Norman Priory of St. Mary Overy, and its old nave, of which the
+fragments may yet be seen, was built in 1106 by Gifford, Bishop of
+Winchester. A century later, another Bishop built the choir and Lady
+Chapel, and altered the character of the nave from Norman to Early
+English. Then, at the Dissolution, St. Mary Overy was made into a
+parish church by Henry VIII., and since 1540, it has been known as
+"St. Saviour's." The early Saxon dedication to "St. Mary Overy"
+commemorates the romantic story of the rich old ferryman's lovely
+daughter, of pre-Conquest times, who, losing her lover by a fall from
+his horse, retired into a cloister for life, devoting her paternal
+wealth to the founding of a priory. The story is charming, but
+somewhat misty; it suggests, however, the advantages accruing to
+ferrymen when there were no bridges on the Thames! An ancient,
+nameless, ghoul-like figure, in St. Saviour's Church, is still pointed
+out as the old ferryman, father of the foundress; but this is probably
+traditional. Skeleton-like figures, not representing any one in
+particular, were not infrequently placed about in mediaeval churches;
+in order, perhaps, to bring the congregation to a sufficiently sober
+frame of mind, as well as to recall to them their latter end.
+
+St. Saviour's, as it is now, is one of the most striking churches in
+London; its interior appeals at once to the eye and to the
+imagination. The long aisles are restful and harmonious; the
+Early-English architecture is severely pure; the fine effect of the
+beautifully-restored nave and transepts is not, as too often in
+Westminster Abbey, spoiled by the introduction of ornate tombs and
+sprawling angels. The church, restored by Blomfield in 1890-96, is
+already a collegiate church, and is worthy to become, as it probably
+will, the cathedral for South London. Its level, as is the case with
+many ancient buildings, is now considerably lower than the surrounding
+ground; a fact testified by the steps necessary to descend into its
+precincts from the street, and by the very unpoetic railway, carried
+well above it and its adjoining vegetable market (the Borough Market).
+For this is a strangely busy and noisy spot to have sheltered for so
+long this relic of the Middle Age.
+
+The tombs in the church are mainly in the transepts, and are nearly
+all of them interesting. The finely-restored "Lady Chapel," behind the
+altar, contains the tomb of Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester,
+with a long Latin inscription of 1626; a recumbent painted effigy, on
+a black-and-white marble tomb. This Lady Chapel has tragic
+associations; it was used in the time of "Bloody Mary" as the
+Consistorial Court of Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester; and here those
+sturdy martyrs, Bishop Hooper and John Rogers, Vicar of St.
+Sepulchre's, were condemned to be burnt (the popular feeling for
+Rogers being such as necessitated his removal by night secretly to
+Newgate).
+
+The most famous grave in St. Saviour's is that of John Gower, the
+fourteenth-century poet, and friend of Chaucer. Here, near the east
+end of the north wall of the nave, the effigy of the poet, painted,
+like that of Lancelot Andrewes, a figure of striking beauty, lies on a
+sarcophagus under a rich gabled canopy. Stow thus describes the
+monument:
+
+     "He lieth under a tomb of stone, with his image, also of
+     stone, over him; the hair of his head, auburn, long to his
+     shoulders but curling up, and a small forked beard; on his
+     head a chaplet like a coronet of four roses; a habit of
+     purple, damasked down to his feet; a collar of esses gold
+     about his neck; under his head the likeness of three books
+     which he compiled."
+
+Gower was a rich man for a poet, and gave large sums in his time for
+the rebuilding of the church; hence was written the following epigram:
+
+  "This church was rebuilt by John Gower, the rhymer,
+   Who in Richard's gay court was a fortunate climber;
+   Should any one start, 'tis but right he should know it,
+   Our wight was a lawyer as well as a poet."
+
+Gower's three chief works, on which his head rests, are his _Vox
+Clamantis_, _Speculum Meditantis_, and _Confessio Amantis_.
+
+Many other curious tombs and epitaphs are in this church. One,
+especially, of the latter, a tablet to a little girl of ten, Susanna
+Barford,--a child the "Non such of the world for piety and vertue in
+soe tender yeares,"--tells how:
+
+  "Such grace the King of Kings bestow'd upon her
+   That now shee lives with him a maid of honour."
+
+And in the north transept, there is a curious monument to Dr. Lionel
+Lockyer, the pill inventor--a large bewigged, reclining figure of
+Charles II.'s time--suffering, apparently, despite his infallible
+nostrums, from terrible internal spasms. Perhaps, however, these may
+bear some mystic reference to the long accompanying epitaph about
+"undying Pills," showing that already in the seventeenth century
+advertisement could be strong even in death! Close to Lockyer's tomb
+are heaped up a number of strange wooden painted gargoyles or
+"bosses," preserved and brought here from the fallen-in
+fifteenth-century roof of the nave, some of them bearing most weird
+devices. One, conceived apparently in the Dantesque spirit, represents
+a giant, or devil, "champing" a half-eaten sinner,--the lower half of
+whom, dressed in gaudy colours, projects from the large vermilion
+mouth,--in great enjoyment. Other "bosses" show the curious painted
+"rebuses" of the period, commemorating a prior's name. The
+seventeenth-century monument to the Austin family, also in this
+transept, is full of quaint imagery and symbolism. The figures of its
+sleeping angels with winnowing-forks, waiting on each side for the
+great final harvest, are full of beauty.
+
+"Edmund Shakespear, player," and brother of the poet,--Fletcher,--and
+Massinger,--are buried here; three stones in the choir bear their
+names; the exact place of their graves is not known.
+
+The church is now well-kept and carefully tended; it is open daily to
+the visitor, who may walk about it without let or hindrance. Like so
+many other London churches, it has in its time suffered less from the
+depredations of the plunderer than from those of the more dangerous
+"restorer." As usual, a long period of neglect and decay was followed
+by iconoclastic cleaning and setting in order. Generally, for a
+considerable time after the Dissolution, the convent churches and
+others were left to the tender mercies of the parishioners, who,
+naturally, could not always afford to keep them in proper condition;
+then abuses crept in, thefts took place; and the disused churches, as
+St. Paul's itself, were often degraded to stables, or used as storage
+for litter. Then, after long years, the authorities, perhaps, came to
+the rescue, and, turning out the encroaching and invading devils, let
+in other devils far more wicked, in the shape of so-called
+"restorers." Wonder, indeed, is it that so much is left to us! The
+"restorers" usually began by whitewashing all the columns of dark
+Purbeck marble, blackening the effigies into one uniform tint, and
+covering the discoloured carvings of the walls with stucco, for the
+better reception of which they even (as may be seen at St. Saviour's)
+whittled away bits of fine stone sculpture.
+
+To wander down the "Borough" High Street--that noisy and essentially
+modern district,--in search of Chaucer's famous inns, is, alas! more
+dispiriting than looking for traces of Dido among the ruins of
+Carthage. Here, one can neither look for ghosts, nor feelings of the
+past; all is hopelessly covered up and hidden by ugly modern inns,
+more ugly modern shops, palaces of modern plate-glass public-houses,
+triumphs of early nineteenth-century ugliness in architecture. What
+chance, among such, have the poor wandering ghosts of a famous past?
+And, since London Bridge, that natural dividing-line of peoples, was
+passed, have not the very streets changed in some subtle and
+unconscious manner, to a more sordid character; the shops to a more
+blatant kind,--even the people to a different and lower type? It may
+be partly fancy; yet, is not this often the effect produced by the
+"Surrey side"? The big thoroughfare called the Borough High Street, or
+more simply, the "Borough"--(this part of Southwark has fairly earned
+the right to be called the "Borough," having returned two members to
+Parliament for 500 years),--this was the great highway, even in Roman
+times, between the city and the southern counties. East of the
+Borough, the long, narrow, busy, dirty Tooley Street leads to
+Bermondsey; this street is famous for its "three tailors" of the
+political legend, according to which they addressed the House of
+Commons as "We, the People of England." Here, from mediaeval days, was
+the only bridge; here, therefore, were, naturally, stationed all the
+mediaeval inns and hostelries. This way did the "Canterbury Pilgrims"
+pass out of London; here they would stop and refresh themselves at the
+"Tabard," the "White Hart," and their compeers.... What now remains of
+these? The "Tabard," rebuilt in Charles II.'s time, and for long the
+finest old house of its kind in London, was burnt down in 1873; it now
+only exists in its name, still flaunted bravely above a commonplace
+modern inn. The "Queen's Head," the "White Hart," the "King's Head,"
+exist now only as hideous railway-yards or equally hideous modern
+edifices; the only remaining relic of them all is the "George" Inn,
+where a solitary fragment, a long block of ancient buildings, with
+picturesque, sloping, dormer roofs, and balustraded wooden galleries,
+is yet, by the mercy of the Great Northern Railway Company, spared to
+us, to tell of its former glories. The present hosts of the
+"George,"--two ladies,--are pleasant, hospitable people, and their
+small, dark, panelled rooms are clean and comfortable. They seem,
+however, to entertain a mild feeling of boredom for the constant
+accession of reverent pilgrims who flock annually to their shrine.
+"And it's only for the last few years," the younger lady remarks,
+somewhat sadly, "only since the last inn, the 'Queen's Head,' you know
+was pulled down, that so many people have come. A great many Americans
+... oh, I suppose they come out of curiosity, like; one can't blame
+'em. Do people stay here in the summer? Yes, a good few--some business
+men, but mostly artists and tourists; it's just curiosity. Then, it's,
+'Would you mind if I take a photograph?' or 'Have I your leave to sit
+in the yard and sketch?' Do I let them do it?... oh, yes" (with a
+sigh), "it doesn't matter to me. I suppose they may be going to put it
+in some book or some article; but it's nothing to me.... I never read
+the article!"
+
+[Illustration: _Cricket in the Street. The lost Ball._]
+
+If this lady be not a cynic, she at any rate embodies a great deal of
+the philosophy of life!
+
+What the other Inns were like, can be more or less seen from this
+small portion of one. They have mostly vanished with the march of
+progress of recent years, for fifty years ago Dickens could still
+write:
+
+     "In the Borough there still remain some half-dozen old inns
+     which have preserved their external features unchanged.
+     Great rambling queer old places, with galleries and passages
+     and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish
+     materials for a hundred ghost stories."
+
+At the old "White Hart," now destroyed, Dickens first introduced to
+the world the immortal Sam Weller, as he appeared cleaning the
+spinster aunt's boots after that sentimental lady's elopement with the
+deceiving Mr. Jingle. These old inns, in the heyday of their prime,
+were made still more famous by the open-air theatrical representations
+that took place in their balconied courtyards. Toil and trouble, the
+eternal struggle-for-life, may be the portion of "the Surrey Side"
+to-day, but in Shakespeare's time it was principally noted for its
+amusements and its junketings. Now, the chief buildings of Southwark
+and Walworth are gaols and asylums, and its best-known localities are
+the omnibus terminuses, dignified mysteriously by names of
+public-houses,--such as the "Elephant," &c. Even the dramatic tastes
+of the people "over the water" are now supposed to be primitive; and
+"transpontine" is the adjective applied to melodrama that is too crude
+for the superior taste of northern London. Yet here, in Shakespeare's
+day, were all the most fashionable theatres--theatres, too, frequented
+by all the literary and dramatic lights of the day. Here stood that
+small martello-tower-like theatre, the "Globe," the "round wooden 'O'"
+alluded to in _Henry V._, where Shakespeare and his companions played;
+here also were the "Rose," the "Hope," and the "Swan." And below St.
+Saviour's, and its neighbouring Bishops' Palace and park, were the
+localities known as "Bankside" and "Paris Garden," the former famous
+for its bull and bear-baiting ("a rude and nasty pleasure," says
+Pepys), the latter for its theatre, and also for its somewhat
+doubtful reputation. There were, of course, a few plague-spots,
+inseparable from places of public amusement; but the Southwark of
+Elizabeth's day was a centre of national jollity and merry-making.
+Open gardens fringed the river-banks, by which flowed a clear and yet
+unsullied Thames, and their salubrious walks were the favourite resort
+of citizens. Certainly, Shakespeare and his associates would hardly
+recognize Southwark now: Messrs. Barclay and Perkins's famous brewery
+now covers the site of the Globe Theatre; the ancient gardens have
+given place to wharves and warehouses; the fashionable promenade to
+railway lines and goods offices; the green turfy banks to streets and
+lanes of sticky Southwark mud. And Southwark mud is surely of a quite
+peculiar stickiness! The big brewery, covering some twelve acres, is
+not exactly an improvement on the landscape. It belonged, in 1758, to
+Mr. Thrale, husband of the witty lady whom Johnson loved as a
+daughter. And though some among us have, as Dr. Johnson prophesied at
+the sale of the brewery in its early days, "grown rich beyond the
+dreams of avarice," yet the source of riches is seldom in itself
+beautifying.
+
+Winchester House, the ancient palace of the Bishops of Winchester,
+stood in Tudor days between St. Saviour's and the river; "a very fair
+house, with a large wharf and a landing-place." Here Bishop Gardiner
+lived in great state, and here, to please his patron the Duke of
+Norfolk, he arranged "little banquets at which it was contrived that
+Henry VIII. should meet the Duke's niece, Katherine Howard, then a
+'lovely girl in her teens.'" Poor thing! in a short year or two her
+head was destined to fall, by the headsman's axe, within the precincts
+of the gloomy Tower, on the river's opposite bank! The extent of the
+old palace is uncertain; its remains are now nearly all destroyed,
+except an old window and arch, built up into the surrounding
+warehouses. The name, however, of the "Clink," the prison used by the
+Bishops for the punishment of heretics, still exists in the modern
+Clink Street. In the same way, "Mint Street," Borough, recalls an
+ancient and forgotten mint, established here by Henry VIII. for
+coinage; and Lant Street--but Lant Street recalls nothing so much as
+Dickens, and his creation Mr. Bob Sawyer. Dickens lived in Lant Street
+himself as a boy, while his insolvent family were rusticating in the
+neighbouring Marshalsea; hence he knew it well.
+
+[Illustration: _A County Court._]
+
+     "A bed and bedding" (he writes) "were sent over for me"
+     (from the Marshalsea), "and made up on the floor. The little
+     window had a pleasant prospect of a timber-yard; and when I
+     took possession of my new abode, I thought it was a
+     Paradise."
+
+"The Crown Revenues," Dickens further adds (in describing the abode
+of Mr. Bob Sawyer), "are seldom collected in this happy valley; the
+rents are dubious, and the water communication is very frequently cut
+off."
+
+If Southwark contained many doubtful characters in Shakespeare's time,
+it contains, as Mr. Charles Booth's book shows us, some "black spots"
+of crime still! The old Marshalsea and the King's Bench Prisons must
+always have been a centre of drifting and shiftless population. All
+parts of the "Borough" do not enjoy a thoroughly good reputation; bad
+sanitation, overcrowding, all the worst sins of the much-abused "East
+End," may here too be seen. "Is any one," asks a recent writer, "ever
+young in the Borough? Is not carking care their birthright?" In
+crowded Southwark and Walworth, round the "Elephant,"--the mysterious
+"Elephant," to which all roads lead,--"aflare, seething, roaring with
+multitudinous life," are miserable human rabbit-warrens, where they
+even live ten in a room. "Pore, sir," cries Mrs. Pullen (one of the
+submerged), "pore! why, the Mint, sir, the Mint, sir, is known for it;
+you've 'erd on it your ways, ain't you?" Mrs. Pullen held up her hands
+and laughed, as if she was really proud of "the Mint and its poverty."
+But, though the Borough children--poor little wastrels--are still
+wild,--Education, it seems, is slowly taming them.
+
+Those who are interested in the children of the poor,--and who is
+not?--should read Mr. Charles Morley's sympathetic "Studies in Board
+Schools," a considerable portion of which refers to Walworth and the
+Borough. The redeeming of the infant population of London is surely a
+noble work, and nowhere are the parental methods of the Board Schools
+so well set forth as in that delightful volume, real with the reality
+of life, and, like life itself, something between laughter and tears.
+Life has few mysteries for the Borough child, whose garments are
+strange and weird, whose voice "soon loses any infantine sweetness it
+may possess. Some of the ragged mites of girls of the Borough will
+even rap out an oath which would shock your ears who live over the
+water. But they mean nothing. It is like sailors' language, only sound
+and a little temper. Why, even the chirrup of the Borough sparrow has
+a minatory ring about it." Mr. Morley goes on to tell of a kindly
+institution dubbed "the Farm House" (strange name in such
+surroundings!), where, owing to Mr. G. R. Sims and the "Referee," six
+or seven hundred hungry school-children are, like the sparrows and
+sea-gulls, fed daily during the long winter:
+
+     "The Farm House" (he says), "is a strange mansion to find in
+     the heart of the Marshalsea--just over the way is the site
+     of the famous prison. The graveyard of St. George the Martyr
+     is now a public garden, grim enough, to be sure, with its
+     black tombstones and soot-laden balsam poplars. On one of
+     the walls is placed a board on which is printed the legend:
+     'This stands on the site of the Marshalsea Prison described
+     (or words to this effect) in Charles Dickens's well-known
+     novel, _Little Dorrit_.' The Farm House was once the town
+     dwelling of the Earls of Winchester. It has an ancient
+     time-worn front, a court, mysterious chambers, old oak
+     panels upon which you can just make out some of the old
+     Winchester ladies and gentlemen; a curious old staircase;
+     and I daresay a ghost or two if one went into the matter.
+     But for a long time past it has been a common lodging-house.
+     Beds in a haunted chamber may be had at fourpence a night.
+     Many a strange history could those white-washed walls tell
+     if they could speak, I dare say--of the good old days in
+     Henry the Eighth's time, and even of more recent years. Many
+     a man who began life with the hopefullest prospects has been
+     glad to hide his head in the old Farm House, down Marshalsea
+     way, Borough."
+
+"Misery," continues this writer, "is strangely prolific; every hovel,
+every court, every alley teems with children," "little mothers"
+carrying heavy babies, like Miss Dorothy Tennant's tender picture, _A
+Load of Care_ ... that heavy, heavy baby, weighing down that tiny,
+tiny nurse.... _Nota Bene_: There always _is_ a baby. By the time a
+little wool appears on the head of number one, number two appears, and
+so on--well, nearly _ad infinitum_. There is no doubt whatever that
+babies are the bugbears of the Borough ratepayers."
+
+The Board Schools in these districts teach, it appears, not only "the
+three R's," but also housewifery, house-cleaning, cooking, and other
+most necessary accomplishments:
+
+     "Housewifery" (says Mr. Morley) "is the birthright of the
+     children of the poor.... Every mite of a girl down in the
+     East or South ... is a housewife by the time she is six....
+     Often enough when times are hard and funds very low--when
+     father is out o' work, and mother's bad in bed--does the
+     poor little mother set forth with scrubbing-brush in hand,
+     and clean the door-steps of the prosperous for twopence or
+     threepence, according to the size and number of the steps.
+     She probably lights the fire of a morning; it is her delight
+     to go shopping to the remarkable establishment where most of
+     the necessities of life are to be obtained by the
+     farthing's-worth; and with the mysteries of marketing she is
+     very well acquainted indeed. You should just see her in
+     Bermondsey, the Walworth Road, the Dials, the New Cut, or
+     Whitechapel on a Sunday morning, when these localities are
+     alive with poor people buying their dinners. Road and
+     footpath are blocked with stalls and barrows, and flesh,
+     fish, fowl and vegetables are all jumbled together in
+     confusion that is apparently inextricable. But little mother
+     knows her way about, and whether it is red meat or white
+     meat, beef, mutton or rabbit, trust her for getting a
+     bargain, for keeping a sharp eye on weight and measure. A
+     farden is a farden in districts where a penny is a
+     substantial coin of the realm."
+
+The "Surrey Side" is noted for its hospitals, as well as its prisons
+and its slums; and of these "Guy's Hospital," on the left of the
+Borough High Street,--an eighteenth-century foundation, due to the
+wealth of a Lombard Street bookseller named Thomas Guy,--is one of the
+most important. This Guy was in his way a miser, and his savings were
+vastly increased by dealings in South Sea stock,--showing that some
+good, at any rate, was wrought by the terrible "Bubble" that ruined so
+many thousands. Yet the hospital narrowly escaped losing the rich
+man's bequest. He was on the point of marrying his pretty maid, Sally,
+when, his bride offending him by officious interference, he broke off
+the marriage, and endowed the present hospital with his great wealth.
+A blackened brass statue of the founder stands in the courtyard of the
+edifice.
+
+If Chaucer, with his ever memorable _Canterbury Pilgrims_, did much to
+immortalise the Southwark of mediaeval times, Dickens, the child of a
+later era, has done at least as much for the Southwark of his day. In
+the Borough High Street, close to the site of the demolished
+Marshalsea Prison, stands St. George's Church, chiefly remarkable for
+the fact that Dickens has here placed the marriage of his heroine,
+"Little Dorrit," the Child of the Marshalsea. This was always a
+district of prisons; the natural sequence, one would think, of
+Southwark merry-making. Of the two Marshalsea prisons established here
+at different times, the earlier, nearer to London Bridge, was
+abolished in 1849; the later, so graphically described by Dickens, was
+not pulled down till 1887, after having been let for forty years as a
+lodging for tramps and vagabonds. Relics of it are now hard to find.
+Dickens, who knew it well as a boy, thus describes (in the preface to
+_Little Dorrit_) his search for it in later life:
+
+     "I found the outer front courtyard metamorphosed into a
+     butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the
+     jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent
+     'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,' I came to Marshalsea
+     Place, the houses in which I recognized, not only as the
+     great block of the former prison, but as preserving the
+     rooms that arose to my mind's eye when I became Little
+     Dorrit's biographer.... Whoever goes into Marshalsea Place,
+     turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find
+     his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea
+     jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left,
+     very little altered if at all, except that the walls were
+     lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in
+     which the debtors lived; will stand among the crowding
+     ghosts of many miserable years."
+
+Dickens's boyish recollections of the ancient debtors prison have, as
+was perhaps natural, sometimes more than a tinge of bitterness; here
+he passed to and fro during wretched childish years, between the daily
+drudgery of covering blacking pots at "Murdstone and Grinby's," down
+by Hungerford Stairs. More wretched, indeed, far, than any modern
+Borough waif, was this neglected and sensitive child of genius. The
+intense torture of his degradation (as he thought it) was never wholly
+forgotten. In this connection he tells (in Forster's _Life_) a
+pathetic little story. No boy at the blacking office, it seems, knew
+where or how he lived; and once, being taken ill there, and helped
+towards home by a kindly fellow-worker, the child Dickens said
+good-bye to his friend by Southwark Bridge:
+
+     "I was too proud" (he says) "to let him know about the
+     prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him,
+     to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook
+     hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark-bridge
+     on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a
+     finishing piece of reality in case of his looking back, I
+     knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman
+     opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin's house."
+
+While the boy suffered thus acutely, his father lived on in a
+Micawberish way at the Marshalsea, being merely of the amiable,
+shiftless, idle genus that drags its family down. For the rest, they
+did well enough at the Marshalsea: "The family," the son wrote, "lived
+more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time out of
+it. They were waited on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham
+Street, the orphan girl from Chatham workhouse, from whose sharp
+little worldly, yet also kindly, ways I took my first impressions of
+the "Marchioness" in _The Old Curiosity Shop_."
+
+Yet Destiny works in strange and devious ways, and all the while, if
+he had only known it, the Fates were conspiring for Charles Dickens's
+good. It was the father's misfortunes that really taught the boy all
+he needed to learn. Here, amid the unsavoury purlieus of the prison,
+he unconsciously studied all the types and localities of which he was
+to make such wonderful use in after-life. The Marshalsea and its ways;
+Lant Street and Bob Sawyer; "Tip," "of the prison prisonous, and of
+the streets streety"; Sam Weller at the "White Hart;" Nancy at London
+Bridge Steps; Sikes and Folly Ditch; with a hundred others,--were,
+more or less, to be the outcome of that time.
+
+The glamour of a romantic past, the spirit of Chaucer and of
+Shakespeare, may still attach to Southwark; the playhouses and
+gaieties of Elizabeth's time may yet leave some faint record there;
+but it is, after all, by another of Fate's strange ironies, the Child
+of the Marshalsea, the boy brought up in wretchedness and squalor, who
+has glorified by his genius the place, the whole district, where he so
+suffered in early youth. Other and greater men have told London's
+history in the past; but Dickens, whose grave is still faithfully
+tended in Westminster Abbey while those of the mightier dead are long
+forgotten, Dickens, who cared everything for the lower, warmer phases
+of humanity; Dickens, to whom every grimy London stone was dear, and
+every dirty cockney child a creature of infinite possibilities;
+Dickens, whose name will be ever dear to the faithful Londoner; is the
+modern chronicler of the great city.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE INNS OF COURT
+
+     "The perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the
+     law."--_Dickens._
+
+                            "those bricky towers,
+  The which on Thames' broad aged back doe ride,
+  Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
+  There whilom wont the Templar knights to bide,
+  Till they decayed through pride."--_Spenser._
+
+
+Among the by-ways that open suddenly out of the highways of London,
+are there any more attractive than the Inns of Court? which, in an
+almost startling manner, bring into the whirl of Holborn, and the din
+of Fleet Street, something of the charm of an older and more peaceful
+world. No parts of London are more delightful, and few call up more
+interesting historic associations. Picturesque and charming old
+enclosures,--full of that mysterious and intangible "romance of
+London" that appealed so strongly to writers such as Lamb, Dickens,
+and Nathaniel Hawthorne,--the Inns of Court have in their time
+sheltered many great men. How strange and how unexpected, in the very
+heart of busy London, are these quiet old-world quadrangles, of calm,
+collegiate aspect, of infinite peace; a peace that seems perhaps more
+intense in contrast with the outside, just as the London "close" of
+greenery seems all the greener for its being set amid the surrounding
+grime, shining "like a star in blackest night." Historic houses,
+indeed, in every sense, are these old Inns, with their worm-eaten
+wooden staircases, worn into holes by the passage of countless feet;
+their panelled walls inscribed with many names; their floors often
+crazy and slanting as the decks of a ship in mid-ocean. Even the
+so-called "laundresses" who act as caretakers and servants in these
+establishments, seem as though they belonged to former centuries, and
+were, in a manner, impervious to the flight of time. Many have been
+the noted residents in the Inns; the most noted, perhaps, of those in
+the Temple are Fielding, Charles Lamb, and the poet Cowper; Dr.
+Johnson lived once in Staple Inn, writing _Rasselas_ there "in the
+evenings of a week," to defray his mother's funeral expenses. Surely,
+if ghosts ever walk, they must walk in these historic abodes. It was
+my lot lately to search for rooms in one of the Inns (I will not
+invidiously specify which). The rooms were romantic enough, at a
+cursory glance; further investigations revealed, I regret to say, the
+fact that romance was depressingly dark, as well as unduly favourable
+to rats, mice, and the unholy black-beetle; to say nothing of a
+general and indescribable musty smell.
+
+"How long have these rooms been vacant?" I inquired, with some faint
+show of cheerfulness, of the frowsy "laundress," a Dickensy lady with
+an appalling squint and a husky voice suggestive of the bottle.
+
+"W'y, not to say long, 'm. On'y a year come nex' Wensday. Though not
+to deceive you 'm, the larst gempleman as lived 'ere, 'e give the
+place a bad name."
+
+"What did he do?" I inquired, startled.
+
+"W'y, 'e had the 'orrors dreadful; 'e did away with 'isself; _that's
+where it is_" (with increased huskiness).
+
+I looked tremblingly at the panelled walls, the blackened ceiling, the
+faded carpet. Was it fancy, or did I see a darker patch in the
+threadbare web, and the shadow of a dusky Roman pointing from the
+ceiling (as in Dickens's murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn) threateningly at
+that darker stain? "'Orrors"! I thought; and no wonder! Romance, rats,
+and old panelling are, no doubt, beautiful in their way; but hardly
+suitable to prosaic, everyday life.
+
+It is, perhaps, in these old Inns, that, more than anywhere else in
+London, the past is linked with the present. Much the same did they
+look, their red brick perhaps a trifle less charmingly darkened by
+time, in the days when fair ladies and gallant gentlemen walked in
+their green plots, the ladies in the quaint clinging dresses of the
+Georgian era, the gentlemen in the gay lace ruffles and knee-breeches
+of that picturesque period in dress. If London stones could speak,
+what stories could they tell! The old elm trees, planted by Bacon
+(Lord Verulam) that shade so charmingly the cool green sward of Gray's
+Inn, were comparatively youthful when Mr. Pepys walked with his
+lady-wife in that historic enclosure "to observe the fashions of the
+ladies, because of my wife making some clothes." Time enough, surely,
+for the trees to have developed a quite Wordsworthian seriousness!
+There were many rooks in these gardens; but these have lately
+disappeared, owing, thinks Mr. Hare, "to the erection of a corrugated
+iron building near them some years ago"! Possibly Mr. Hare credits the
+rooks with an aesthetic feeling for beauty!
+
+Charles Lamb, that "small, spare man in black,"--who, with his saddest
+of life-histories, his patient devotion and fortitude, ill deserved
+Carlyle's crude vituperation,--was a great devotee of the Inns, and
+especially of the Temple, his birthplace. It was in Little Queen
+Street, off Holborn, that the early tragedy happened that saddened all
+his life; the murder of his mother by the hand of his dearly-loved
+sister, in a fit of insanity. After this terrible occurrence, the
+brother took his sister Mary into his charge, never after to part from
+her, except only for her occasional necessary periods of restraint in
+an asylum. In Colebrook Row, Islington, where Lamb retired on his
+emancipation from the India Office, was the last abode of this devoted
+couple; and here occurred the pathetic incident recorded by a friend,
+that of the brother and sister walking across the fields towards the
+safety of the neighbouring asylum, hand-in-hand, like two children,
+and weeping bitterly.
+
+[Illustration: _Pepys and his Wife._]
+
+The Temple, so beloved of Charles Lamb, is the most widely known of
+all the Inns; being the largest, and in some ways the most attractive.
+Its garden-lawns slope gently and pleasantly towards the river; and
+its quaint, time-honoured, and beautiful old squares have the added
+charm of a long and romantic history. For here once was the stronghold
+of the Knights Templars, that powerful fraternity, so masterful in the
+picturesque Middle Ages; and, though the only substantial relic of
+them that yet exists here is the old Temple Church, their memory still
+lingers about these courts and gateways, adorned with their arms. And
+Charles Lamb,--the real child of the Temple,--has, though born at a
+later time, invested the place with a double charm. Born in 1775, in
+Crown Office Row, his father servant to a Bencher of the Inner Temple,
+the boy, from his earliest years, breathed in the poetry and romance
+of his surroundings. Has not his touching description of a childhood
+spent here almost the dignity of a classic?
+
+     "I was born" (he says), "and passed the first seven years of
+     my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens,
+     its fountain, its river, I had almost said--for in those
+     young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream
+     that watered our pleasant places?--these are my oldest
+     recollections.... What an antique air had the now almost
+     effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming
+     coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take
+     their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven,
+     holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would
+     the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of
+     childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice
+     as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep!
+
+  "Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
+   Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"
+
+In the Temple Gardens, which, mercifully enough, have never yet been
+threatened with being built over, the famous annual flower-shows are
+held. To these gardens, where the Red Cross Knights walked at eve,
+where the gallants of Tudor and Stuart times paraded their powder and
+ruffles, are now yearly brought all the English flowers that skill can
+grow. In May and June, the wide green expanse becomes a bower of
+roses; in late autumn it is the chrysanthemums, the special flowers of
+the Temple, that have their turn. Chrysanthemums are London's own
+flowers, and care little for soot; as for the roses, they are brought
+hither in masses from the country, "to make a London holiday." And,
+surely, never were seen such blooms as at these annual rose-shows! A
+Heliogabalus would indeed be in his glory. Every year new flowers, new
+combinations of colour, of shape are invented; and garden-lovers
+congregate, compare, and copy. Roses will not now deign to grow in
+London soot and smoke; yet the Temple Gardens once were famed for
+their own roses, and here, where now the flower-shows are held, once
+grew, according to Shakespeare, in deadly rivalry, the fatal white and
+red roses of York and Lancaster. He makes Warwick say, in _King Henry
+VI._:
+
+                          "This brawl to-day,
+  Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
+  Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
+  A thousand souls to death and deadly night."
+
+There are many sun-dials in the Temple Gardens, a fact which seems to
+suggest that the average amount of sunshine yearly registered in the
+City was considerably greater in the old days, when, also, possibly,
+for belated roysterers too often
+
+            "The night was senescent,
+  And star-dials pointed to morn,
+  And the star-dials hinted of morn,"
+
+as in Poe's mystic poem. That occasion, for instance, commemorated in
+the _Quarterly Review_ for 1836, when, on some festival held at the
+Inner Temple, less than seventy students consumed among them
+thirty-six quarts of richly-flavoured "sack," a potent beverage, only
+supposed to be "sipped" once by each!
+
+The mottoes on the Temple sun-dials are varied and curious. "Pereunt
+et imputantur," is inscribed on one in Temple Lane; in Brick Court it
+is "Time and Tide tarry for no man"; in Essex Court, "Vestigia nulla
+retrorsum"; and opposite Middle Temple Hall, "Discite justitiam
+moniti."
+
+The Middle Temple, divided from the Inner Temple by Middle Temple
+Lane, is the more picturesque of the two Inns. Among its labyrinthine
+courts and closes, the most charming is "Fountain Court," well known
+to lovers of Dickens. The great writer has caught the spirit of the
+place; where in London, indeed, has he not done so? He is, _par
+excellence_, the novelist of the city in all its aspects, human,
+topographical, artistic, historical. In a few lines, with magic touch,
+he gives you a lasting impression. He makes Ruth Pinch come to meet
+her brother in this court:
+
+     "There was a little plot between them, that Tom should
+     always come out of the Temple by one way; and that was, past
+     the fountain. Coming through Fountain Court, he was just to
+     glance down the steps leading into Garden Court, and to look
+     once all round him; and if Ruth had come to meet him, then
+     he would see her; ... coming briskly up, with the best
+     little laugh upon her face that ever played in opposition to
+     the fountain, and beat it all to nothing.... The Temple
+     fountain might have leaped up twenty feet to greet the
+     spring of hopeful maidenhood, that in her person stole on,
+     sparkling, through the dry and dusty channels of the Law;
+     the chirping sparrows, bred in Temple chinks and crannies,
+     might have held their peace to listen to imaginary skylarks,
+     as so fresh a little creature passed."
+
+Then, when the lover, John Westlock, comes one day:
+
+     "Merrily the fountain leaped and danced, and merrily the
+     smiling dimples twinkled and expanded more and more, until
+     they broke into a laugh against the fountain's rim and
+     vanished."
+
+In this court, too, is Middle Temple Hall, a fine Elizabethan edifice
+of 1572, with a handsome oak ceiling, its windows emblazoned with the
+armorial bearings of the Templar Knights. This Hall was already in
+Tudor times famous for its feasts, masques, revelries; here
+Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_ was performed in 1601, before the queen
+and her splendid court; "the only locality remaining where a play of
+Shakespeare's was listened to by his contemporaries." Even in winter
+Fountain Court is pretty, and its ivied trellises and arches are well
+kept and tended; a lovely view, too, may be enjoyed from it, down over
+the verdant grass slopes of "Garden Court" towards the silvery river
+far below. Lucky, one thinks, are those fortunate beings who have
+"chambers" in Garden Court! poetically named, and the reality still
+more charming than the name! More ornate and less attractive, though
+delightfully placed, are the modern buildings of "Temple Gardens."
+
+Bits of old London, unchanged for centuries, crop up continually in
+the Temple precincts, and recall the time when this was a city of
+timbered houses of tortuous, overhanging, insanitary alleys and lanes,
+easily burned, almost impossible indeed to save when once threatened
+by fire. Small wonder, indeed, that the great fire of 1666 destroyed
+so much of the Temple! Middle-Temple-Lane, narrow, crooked, dark, is
+one of these relics of the past. Here are some picturesque old houses
+of lath and plaster, with overhanging upper floors, and shops beneath
+stuffed with law stationery and requirements; the houses somewhat
+crumbling and dilapidated, and "with an air," like Krook's shop in
+_Bleak House_, "of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it
+were a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law." Every now
+and then, about the Temple, in odd and unexpected nooks and corners,
+you come upon the arms of the Knights Templars; in the Middle Temple
+it is the Lamb bearing the banner of Innocence, and the red cross, the
+original badge of the order; in the Inner Temple,--the winged
+Pegasus,--with the motto, "Volat ad astra virtus." This winged horse
+has a curious history; for, when the horse was originally chosen as an
+emblem, he had no wings, but was ridden by two men at once to indicate
+the self-chosen poverty of the brotherhood; in lapse of years the
+figures of the men became worn and abraded, and when restored were
+mistaken for wings!
+
+Middle-Temple-Lane is entered from Fleet-Street, just beyond the
+Temple-Bar Griffin and the imposing mass of the New Gothic Law-Courts,
+by a dull red-brick gateway, erected by Wren in 1684; and the Inner
+Temple by an archway under a hairdresser's shop, which shop is
+inscribed somewhat romantically as "the palace of Henry VIII. and
+Cardinal Wolsey." (As a matter of fact it was built in James I.'s
+time, and belonged to Henry, Prince of Wales; it subsequently became
+"Nando's Coffee-House.") These picturesque, unassuming archways bear
+the special arms of each Inn, and here, by the winged horse, a wit
+once wrote the following "pasquinade:"
+
+  "As by the Templar's hold you go,
+     The horse and lamb displayed
+   In emblematic figures show
+     The merits of their trade.
+
+  "The clients may infer from thence
+     How just is their profession:
+   The lamb sets forth their innocence,
+     The horse their expedition."
+
+But the main interest of the Temple lies in its ancient church, St.
+Mary's, where in the Middle Ages the Knights Templars worshipped in
+their strength, and where their effigies, stiff and mailed and
+cross-legged, as befits returned crusaders, lie until the judgment
+day. The soldier-monks are gone, their place knows them no more; yet,
+like their more peaceful brethren and neighbours, the Carthusians,
+their spirit still inspires their ancient haunts. The Temple Church,
+begun in 1185, was one of the four round churches built in England in
+imitation of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem,
+after the Templars' return from the first and second crusades;
+mercifully escaping the Great Fire, it has not entirely escaped the
+hardly less dangerous ravages of the "restorer." Through a fine Norman
+arch, under the western porch, the Round Church of 1185 is entered. In
+architecture it is Norman, with a leaning to the Transition style, and
+very rich in decoration. Hence, through groups of Purbeck marble
+columns, you look into the choir, a later addition of 1240, in the
+Early English style, with lancet-headed windows and a groined roof.
+"These two churches," says Mr. Hare, "built at a distance of only
+fifty five years from each other, form one of the most interesting
+examples we possess of the transition from Norman to Early English
+architecture."
+
+In the Round Church are nine monuments of Templars, of the 12th and
+13th centuries, sculptured out of freestone, recumbent, with crossed
+legs, and in complete mail, except one, who wears a monk's cowl. They
+are probably the "eight images of armed knights" mentioned by Stow in
+1598: some few are thought to be identified. Strange, unearthly
+objects! relics of a bygone order and a vanished faith,--silent
+witnesses of centuries' changes,--figures ghostly in the twilight of a
+London winter's day:--effigies of warriors, faithful in the life and
+unto the death that they knew, recalling Spenser's lines:
+
+  "And on his breast a bloudie cross he bore,
+     The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
+   For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
+     And dead, as living, ever Him adored.
+     Upon his shield the like was ever scored,
+   For sovereign hope which in his help he had."
+
+Records of the severity of the Order are not wanting. Here, opening
+upon the stairs leading to the triforium, is the "penitential cell"
+(of such painful abbreviation that the prisoner could neither stand
+nor lie in it), with slits towards the church so that mass might still
+be heard. Here the unhappy Walter le Bacheler, Grand Preceptor of
+Ireland,--for disobedience to the all-powerful Master,--was starved to
+death, and hence also, most likely, culprits were dragged forth naked
+to be flogged publicly before the altar. Priests, in the robust Middle
+Ages, did not always err on the side of mercy or humanity!
+
+The preacher at the Temple Church is still named "the Master," as
+being the successor of the Masters of the Templars. Hooker and
+Sherlock both held the office, and now Canon Ainger is the most modern
+representative of the "Grand Master," that dread mediaeval potentate.
+During the Protectorate, however, the order of succession must, one
+thinks, have fallen into some contempt; for the church became greatly
+dilapidated, and the painted ceilings (according to the usual Puritan
+barbarism) were whitewashed, though the effigies themselves mercifully
+escaped destruction. Lawyers, also, used formerly to receive their
+clients in the Round Church (as it was their custom to do at the
+pillars in St. Paul's), occupying their special posts like merchants
+on 'Change. And thus, that thorough restoration of the church in
+1839-42, which antiquaries so deplore, was no doubt very necessary.
+
+Long might one linger over the Temple and its many associations. Even
+the names of its mazy courts recall old stories, as well as their
+sometime dwellers. Johnson's Buildings where the old Doctor lived at
+one time; Brick Court, where poor, improvident Goldsmith lived, and
+died, as he had lived in debt and difficulties: Inner-Temple-Lane,
+where Charles Lamb lodged, and wrote: "The rooms are delicious, and
+Hare's Court trees come in at the window, so that it's like living in
+a garden." Garden Court (now rebuilt), where Dickens's "Pip" lived;
+"Lamb Court," with the shades of Thackeray's Warrington, Pen, and
+Laura. Tanfield Court, less pleasantly, recalls a murder, that of old
+Mrs. Duncomb, killed by a Temple laundress; the murderess sitting,
+dressed in scarlet, to Hogarth for her portrait, two days before her
+execution. Then there is King's Bench Walk, where Sarah, Duchess of
+Marlborough, came as client, and was so disgusted at finding her legal
+adviser absent: "I could not tell who she was," said the servant,
+reporting the visit to her master, "for she would not tell me her
+name, but she swore so dreadfully that I am sure she must be a lady of
+quality."
+
+But the Temple sundials are sternly marking the time, and we must tear
+ourselves away from the historic precincts. The day is waning, and all
+too soon Embankment and gardens, river and sky, will have changed, by
+some mysterious alchemy, to a "nocturne" of silver and gold. Let us
+hasten back into the din of Fleet Street and the Strand.
+
+Holywell Street, with its tempting book-shops, is now a thing of the
+past; and, for the constant Londoner, the bearings of the Strand world
+have changed much of late. But Wych Street still remains, and behind
+it is the archway into New Inn, a quaint and forsaken place,
+resembling, not merely a backwater, but a stagnant pool, really
+forgotten by the busy tide of life around it. New Inn lies in that
+curious and debatable region between the Strand and the district of
+Clare-Market; but it is so secluded that one might well live in London
+all one's life and never know of it. There is a certain not
+unpicturesque squalor about New Inn and its purlieus; it has, like so
+many of these places, a pathetic air as of having seen better days.
+Possibly, New Inn sees only too well the fate that awaits it, in the
+towering red-brick offices close by, that once were old Clement's Inn!
+"Will they 'talk of mad Shallow yet' in Clement's Inn? Alas! I fear
+that the dwellers in the new mansions will read little of the old
+traditions of the site"! "To New Inn," says Seymour (in his _Summary
+of London_, 1735), "are pleasant walks and gardens;" and still a few
+sickly patches of grass survive, as well as a saddened greenhouse,
+relic of a happier time! Yet the "dusty purlieus of the Law" still, in
+spite of the builder, keep up, in a manner, their gardening
+traditions. Even the massive new "Record Office" does not disdain its
+little strip of garden, and makes praiseworthy attempts to grow turf
+and ground-ivy borders, to refresh the wanderer down Chancery Lane.
+
+In and about Chancery Lane are several more of these small Inns, both
+past and present. "Symond's Inn," so sympathetically described by
+Dickens in _Bleak House_, as the lair of Mr. Vholes, the grasping
+Chancery lawyer, is typical of many of these rusty and decaying nests.
+Symond's Inn, indeed, no longer exists. "Chichester Rents," west of
+Chancery Lane, marks its forgotten site; but the portrait,--slightly
+caricatured, like all Dickens's sketches,--is very suggestive:
+
+     "The name of MR. VHOLES, preceded by the legend GROUND
+     FLOOR, is inscribed upon a doorpost in Symond's Inn,
+     Chancery Lane: a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn,
+     like a large dust-bin of two compartments and a sifter. It
+     looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his day, and
+     constructed his inn of old building materials, which took
+     kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying
+     and dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with congenial
+     shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative
+     of Symond, are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.... Mr.
+     Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation
+     retired, is squeezed up in a corner, and blinks at a dead
+     wall. Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the
+     client to Mr. Vholes's jet-black door, in an angle
+     profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning, and
+     encumbered by a black bulkhead of cellarage staircase,
+     against which belated civilians generally strike their
+     brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale, that
+     one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool;
+     while the other, who elbows him at the same desk, has equal
+     facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome
+     sheep, blending with the smell of must and dust, is
+     referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of
+     mutton fat in candles, and to the fretting of parchment
+     forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is
+     otherwise stale and close. The place was last painted or
+     whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys
+     smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot
+     everywhere, and the dull, cracked windows in their heavy
+     frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a
+     determination to be always dirty, and always shut, unless
+     coerced."
+
+Indeed, the whole region of the law, in its by-ways, and smaller Inns,
+is altogether suggestive of _Bleak House_. Dickens, a kind of Sam
+Weller himself in his knowledge of London, knew all the Inns well,
+living in several of them. He is a faithful chronicler, with this
+reservation, that he has no eye for the picturesque interest, but is
+all eye for the human. Were these places dirtier in Dickens's time?
+That can hardly be. Why, one reflects, is there a kind of tradition in
+such things? even as regards the eternal cats and the equally eternal
+"laundresses"? (called so, presumably, because they never seem to
+wash!) Why are the window panes, apparently, never, never, cleaned?
+Has never any one come here with a love of cleanliness for its own
+sake, or with a yearning for clean windows, to these Inns?
+
+See, for instance, the corner of old Serjeants' Inn, where it joins
+Clifford's Inn! It positively caricatures even Dickens. Black,
+suggestively gruesome as a picture by Hogarth; yet, amid all its dirt,
+still picturesque; everywhere neglect, rust, grime; windows suggestive
+of anything but light, broken and stuffed with dirty paper; no sign of
+life (it being Saturday afternoon), but one old half-starved tabby
+cat, moved out of her wonted apathy by hearing the welcome voice of
+the cats' meat boy in neighbouring Chancery Lane! Is she the aged
+pensioner of some departed inhabitant, and does she, perchance, hope
+to steal, unperceived, some scrap from that unsavoury basket? As she
+slinks along the outer railings of the Clifford's Inn enclosure, and
+across the irregular cobble-stones of the court, one notices that what
+is by courtesy termed a "garden" is merely a cat walk. It is a
+railed-in garden of desolation, its turf long ago forgotten, its
+gravel-paths even obliterated, a dingy strip of earth under a few
+mangy trees. Surely, nobody can have entered that rusty gate for at
+least a hundred years! It might be the garden of the "Sleeping
+Beauty," or at least a London edition of that lady. Poor, deserted
+closes! bits of vanishing London! The tide of progress will remove you
+altogether ere long, and build huge blocks of clean, if unromantic,
+"Chicago" edifices in your place. Yet, their dirt and desolation
+notwithstanding, can we not almost find it in our hearts to regret
+these London byways of a past age?
+
+Perhaps Clifford's Inn may yet maintain some transmitted gloom from
+the fact that here used to live the six attorneys of the Marshalsea
+Court, "which rendered," says a chronicler, "this little spot the
+fountain-head of more misery than any whole county in England." A
+grimy archway, piercing the buildings of Clifford's Inn, and adorned
+(?) by a ramshackle hanging lamp, leads through another tiny courtyard
+to the adjoining Fleet Street. In such crowded city byways,
+"businesses," and things, and people, are often in the strangest
+juxtaposition. It seems as if every possible trade and profession had
+made up its mind to live, in deadly rivalry, within the same few cubic
+feet of mother earth. Here, for instance, a smart kitchen,
+well-appointed, with shining pots and pans, looks straight into the
+windows of a dirty law-stationer's; there, a printing-press rumbles,
+cheek-by-jowl with a Fleet Street tea-shop; here a theatre stage-door
+ogles, at a convenient distance, the inviting back entrance of a
+pawnshop (both of them discreetly placed in a retiring side-alley);
+and there, the much populated "model" looks across, somewhat
+yearningly, to some cat-ridden and rusty desolation, that has got,
+somehow or other, "into Chancery," or some such equivalent for
+oblivion and decay. And, between the Fleet Street entrance to
+Clifford's Inn and Chancery Lane, rises, in strangest medley of all,
+the blackened height of St. Dunstan's in-the-West, a rebuilding of
+1831, by J. Shaw, on an ancient site. Its tall tower is effective, but
+the body of the church has a somewhat abbreviated air, being tightly
+sandwiched in between the new buildings of "Law Life Assurance" on one
+side, and the _Dundee Advertiser_, &c., on the other.
+
+The two famous wooden giants on the old church of St. Dunstan's, that
+used to strike the hours, are now removed to a villa in Regent's Park.
+
+Between Chancery Lane and Holborn, many important rebuildings and
+extensions have been made of recent years; imposing new edifices have
+been raised, and, in some places, building, with the obliteration of
+old landmarks, is still going on, so that those who knew it in old
+days would hardly now recognise the locality. A new Record Office,
+palatial and imposing, in the Tudor style, now extends from Chancery
+Lane across to Fetter Lane, covering what used to be Rolls Yard; and
+the old Rolls Chapel is now incorporated in the newer building. In
+this massive structure, this fire-proof fortress, are kept all the
+documentary treasures of the kingdom, beginning with the famous
+"Domesday Book," of the Conqueror's time. The Records and State
+Archives of England, so long neglected, have at length found a
+suitable home.
+
+[Illustration: _Lincoln's Inn._]
+
+Lincoln's Inn, however, is less altered. The New Hall of the Inn,
+built only in 1845, nevertheless wears a sober and respectable look of
+antiquity; and the new buildings are already less garish. Perhaps, at
+first, in contrasting the new houses of Lincoln's Inn with the old,
+where they rise side by side, one is tempted for a moment to cry out
+against the modern taste in variegated brick-work; till on closer
+examination one finds it to be a faithful copy of the older style,
+only not yet darkened by age! So true is it, as Millais has said, that
+"Time is the greatest of the old Masters." And the smoke of London
+ages buildings quickly; this is one of its advantages. The real
+innovation in the newer style is in the windows; for, where narrow
+lozenges pierced the wall, now are tall, imposing bay windows, a
+wealth of glass before undreamed of. The great modern cry is ever,
+"Let there be light!" But then, we, in our day, do not have to pay
+window tax.
+
+The fine Gatehouse of Lincoln's Inn, that opens upon Chancery Lane,
+has a delightful look of mediaevalism; it is in the Hampton Court
+style, and was built in 1518 by Sir Thomas Lowell, whose arms it
+bears, as well as the date of its erection. Here, tradition says, "Ben
+Jonson, a poor bricklayer, was found working on this gate with a
+_Horace_ in one hand and a trowel in the other, when some gentlemen,
+pitying him, gave him money to leave 'so mean a calling' and pursue
+his studies."
+
+Here in Lincoln's Inn are again quiet, picturesque courts; sundials
+with Latin mottoes; calm enclosures of quiet amidst the surrounding
+racket. At No. 24, "Old Buildings," is a tablet recording the
+residence here of John Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary. An interesting
+story is told of these chambers. The Protector is said to have visited
+his secretary here one day, and disclosed to him a plot for seizing
+the young princes, sons of Charles I. The plans had been discussed,
+when Thurloe's clerk was discovered, apparently asleep, in the room.
+Cromwell was for killing him, but this Thurloe dissuaded him from
+doing, and, passing a dagger repeatedly over his face, thought to
+prove that he was really asleep. The clerk, however, had merely been
+shamming, and he subsequently found means to warn the princes of their
+danger. Such a dramatic story certainly deserves to be true!
+
+Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, though perhaps hardly rural, is still the
+largest and shadiest square in London. It had in old days a bad
+reputation for thieves and footpads, for the pillory, and also, more
+tragically, as a place of execution. Here the conspirators in Mary
+Queen of Scots' cause were hanged and quartered; and here gallant Lord
+William Russell died for alleged treason, "his whole behaviour a
+triumph over death."
+
+The tall substantial houses around Lincoln's-Inn-Fields bear a look of
+bygone state, an ancient grandeur well described in _Bleak House_.
+Here is an account of the mansion inhabited by the astute Mr.
+Tulkinghorn, in this square:
+
+     "Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives
+     Mr. Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now; and
+     in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie
+     like maggots in nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages,
+     and antechambers still remain; and even its painted
+     ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial
+     linen, sprawls among balustrades and pillars, flowers,
+     clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache--as
+     would seem to be Allegory's object always, more or less.
+     Here ... lives Mr. Tulkinghorn.... Like as he is to look at,
+     so is his apartment in the dusk of the afternoon. Rusty, out
+     of date, withdrawing from attention, able to afford it."
+
+The house thus described by Dickens was that of his friend Forster,
+and, no doubt, he knew it well. Very few private houses exist, I
+imagine, in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields to-day: and poor "Allegory" is now
+there for ever at a discount. The fine mansions, with their paved
+forecourts and massive gate-posts, have had their day, and have now
+ceased (for the larger world, that is) to be. Yet it is an imposing
+square still, and, seen in the sunshine of a May morning, is
+distinctly attractive.
+
+Very attractive, too, is Staple Inn, so well known to Londoners by its
+old gabled Holborn front. This, in some ways the most charming of all
+the Inns, is kindly preserved to us by the altruism of the Prudential
+Assurance Company, whose property it is, and who at considerable
+expense have repaired and saved from destruction this historical "bit"
+of Old London. The picturesque gables of Staple Inn, its well-known
+lath-and-plaster front, would, indeed, be sadly missed if they
+disappeared from the line of Holborn. Nothing so well gives the idea
+of the London of the Tudors, of the early Stuarts, as this
+time-honoured edifice. Staple Inn, though generally supposed to be
+earlier, is really of the time of James I: and its crumbling and
+insecure walls, during the recent (and still continuing) building
+operations near it, have required much "underpinning."
+
+Entering under the archway of Staple Inn, we find ourselves suddenly
+in a quiet old court set about with plane trees, and in the middle a
+rustic seat placed, in countrified fashion, round a tree trunk; the
+old Hall of the Inn forming the background. It is a charming spot
+enough, with a most collegiate and secluded air; an air so strange,
+indeed, in this neighbourhood as to have struck many writers, among
+others Nathaniel Hawthorne:
+
+     "I went astray" (he says) "in Holborn, through an arched
+     entrance, over which was 'Staple Inn' ... but in a court
+     opening inwards from this was a surrounding seclusion of
+     quiet dwelling houses, with beautiful green shrubbery and
+     grass-plots in the court, and a great many sunflowers in
+     full bloom.... There was ... not a quieter spot in England
+     than this. In all the hundreds of years since London was
+     built, it has not been able to sweep its roaring tide over
+     that little island of quiet."
+
+And Dickens thus writes of it:
+
+     "Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, where certain
+     gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking out
+     on the public way ... is a little nook composed of two
+     irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those
+     nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street
+     imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having
+     put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on his boots. It is
+     one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in
+     smoky trees, as though they called to one another, 'Let us
+     play at country.'"
+
+Dickens made this the abode of his kindly lawyer of _Edwin Drood_ (Mr.
+Grewgious). The chambers where that gentleman is supposed to have
+dwelt are marked on a stone above the doorway, with initials, and a
+date--1747.
+
+Beyond the first square, through another archway, a garden-plot is
+reached, the garden of the Hall. Very picturesque is this old Hall,
+long and low, with gabled lanthorns,--one large, one small,--and high
+timber roofs. The garden plot is bright even in winter, with
+variegated laurels and a privet hedge; these, with the darkened
+red-brick of the old Hall, make a charming picture. Opposite the
+garden-court extends the new and very attractive modern building of
+1843, on a raised terrace: designed in early Jacobean style, and of a
+simple dignity that does not quarrel with its surroundings. This line
+of buildings is continued towards Chancery Lane by the new "Government
+Patent Office," an admirable structure as yet untouched by the
+mellowing London smoke. The buildings of the "Birkbeck Bank" opposite,
+which, in their turn, tower over the little Staple Inn Hall and
+garden, show,--in painful contrast both to their unobjectionable
+Holborn front, and to the fine simplicity of the Patent Office,--a
+very ornate medley of terra-cotta and Doulton-ware; a chaos of
+bluish-green pillars and aggressive plaques and tiles, for which,
+indeed, some covering of London soot is greatly to be wished. One
+might almost think that one had got into Messrs. Spiers and Pond's
+refreshment-rooms or a "Central-Railway-station" by mistake.
+Disillusions, however, are frequent in this semi-chaotic region of new
+and old buildings, and it must be confessed that the back of the
+Patent Office (in "Quality Court") is somewhat disappointing after its
+front view; it resembles, with its old, blackened pillars, a disused
+dissenting chapel; and Quality Court itself seems, like so many of the
+purlieus of the smaller Inns, mainly redolent of charwomen, cats, and
+orange-peel. Nevertheless, even in dingy "Quality Court" there are
+some respectable houses with quaint old doorways, as well as some good
+iron-work in the upper balconies.
+
+[Illustration: _Fetter Lane._]
+
+Some of the neighbouring courts are, however, far more unsavoury. See,
+for instance, "Fleur-de-Lis" Court, off Fetter Lane, a miserable,
+dilapidated flagged alley. The last time I visited this place, I
+found a few dirty children dancing to a poor cripple's playing of a
+kind of spinet or portable piano (some of the "music" of these
+peripatetic street-players is of a weird kind). Fleur-de-Lis
+Court!--charmingly named, but, like all courts with such romantic
+appellations, particularly grimy and squalid. Further up, away from
+Fetter Lane, where the "court" or narrow alley becomes even more
+wretchedly ruinous, is a barn-like place labelled "Newton Hall." It
+seems at a first glance to be the very abomination of desolation; its
+rusty door padlocked, with an air, too, of never-being-opened. Is
+there anything, I wondered at a first glance, more dismal in all
+London? Yet, on looking nearer, I seemed to see something
+comparatively clean shining on the wall of "Newton Hall," amid the
+surrounding grime. Can it be,--yes, it is,--a label,--and apparently
+affixed there within the memory of man: "Positivist Society." Surely,
+I reflected, the Positivist Cause must be in a bad way, if the
+dilapidation of the buildings be any guide to the state of the
+persuasion itself! It is, however, unfair to judge the state of
+Positivism from Fleur-de-Lis Court, for the whole neighbourhood has,
+evidently, but a short span of life remaining, and the court and its
+purlieus will soon be things of the past. Positivism is already
+removing or removed; and Newton Hall, till Fleur-de-Lis Court is
+transmogrified in the march of progress into offices or
+model-dwellings, will rust for some few years in peace.
+
+The neighbourhood in which the old Hall stands is full of historic
+memories. As is ever the case in crowded Central London, the past, the
+many pasts, are strangely involved and blended, buried one beneath the
+other. Dryden and Otway are said to have once lived--and
+quarrelled--on and near this site. Then, in 1710, Sir Isaac Newton,
+the then President of the Royal Society, induced that body to buy a
+house and garden here from Dr. Barebones, a descendant of the
+"Praise-God-Barebones" of Puritan times. Sir Christopher Wren
+concurred in the purchase, and L1,450 was paid for the freehold. In
+this house the Royal Society held their meetings till they removed to
+Somerset House in 1782; and they built on its garden the present
+"Newton Hall,"--which hall, some say, is really from the designs of
+Wren. In 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, unhappy son of genius, gave
+his last public lectures here; later, it was used as a chapel, and
+then the Positivist Society made it their home. It is strange to
+reflect that the chief reason advanced by Sir Isaac Newton to the
+Royal Society for the purchase of this site, was that it was "in the
+middle of the town and out of noise."
+
+At the Holborn end of Fetter Lane there are still some fine old gabled
+houses, which must soon vanish; several little Inns of Chancery,
+byways out of Holborn and the Strand, have already been swept away:
+Thavies' Inn for instance, where Dickens, surely by an intentional
+anachronism, places Mrs. Jellyby's untidy home; Lyon's Inn, near Wych
+Street, destroyed in 1863; Old Furnival's Inn, on the opposite side of
+Holborn, where Dickens lived when he was first married, has been
+replaced by the offices of the Prudential Assurance Company, the
+saviours of Staple Inn, in intense red-brick. Lastly, Barnard's Inn
+(originally Mackworth's Inn), a charming little Holborn Inn on a tiny
+scale, with small courts, trees, a miniature hall and lanthorn, has
+been bought up by the Mercers' Company and is used by them as a
+school. This Inn is therefore not now accessible to the casual
+visitor; its Holborn entrance may, indeed, easily be missed; "Mercers'
+School," in big gilt letters, adorns its narrow doorway. What a
+delightful private residence, one thinks, for some rich man, would
+such a little Inn as this have made! Strange that no rich man has ever
+thought so! the rich, like sheep, flock ever towards the less
+interesting West End. Dickens, as I have suggested, had little eye for
+the purely picturesque; and of this little Inn, compared by Loftie to
+one of De Hooghe's pictures, he merely says (in _Great Expectations_,)
+that it is "the dirtiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed
+together in a rank corner as a club for tom-cats!" So much, indeed, is
+Beauty in the eye of the seer! Barnard's Inn is also remarkable for
+having been, in the last century, the abode of the last of the
+alchemists.
+
+A gateway on the north side of Holborn leads to Gray's Inn, the most
+northerly of the four big Inns of Court. The gardens of Gray's Inn
+are green and spacious, and its courts and quadrangles have a sober
+solidity that is very attractive. This Inn affords a welcome retreat
+from two of the noisiest and most unpoetic thoroughfares in
+London,--Gray's Inn Road and Theobald's Road.
+
+Here is Hawthorne's description of Gray's Inn Gardens:
+
+     "Gray's Inn is a great quiet domain, quadrangle beyond
+     quadrangle close beside Holborn, and a large space of
+     greensward enclosed within it. It is very strange to find so
+     much of ancient quietude right in the monster City's very
+     jaws, which yet the monster shall not eat up--right in its
+     very belly, indeed, which yet, in all these ages, it shall
+     not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest
+     of its bustling streets. Nothing else in London is so like
+     the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these
+     archways, and find yourself transported from the jumble,
+     rush, tumult, uproar, as of an age of week-days condensed
+     into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath."
+
+And Charles Lamb also said of them:
+
+     "These are the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court--my
+     beloved Temple not forgotten--have the gravest character,
+     their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing.
+     Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel
+     walks."
+
+Bacon (Lord Verulam) planted here not only the spreading elm-trees,
+but also a catalpa in the garden's north-east corner. In Gray's Inn is
+also "Bacon's Mount," which answers to the recommendation in the
+"Essay on Gardens"; "A mount of some pretty height, leaving the wall
+of the enclosure breast high, to look abroad into the fields." Gray's
+Inn Walks were, in Stuart times, very rural as well as very
+fashionable; in 1621 we find them mentioned by Howell as "the
+pleasantest place about London, with the choicest society"; and the
+_Tatler_ and _Spectator_ alike confirm this statement.
+
+But, alas! Gray's Inn Walks are curtailed, and its gardens deserted
+enough, at the present day! No more does Fashion walk there, unless it
+be the "fashion" of the Gray's Inn Road. Many of the solid brick
+squares are fallen, like Mr. Tulkinghorn's haunt of "Allegory," into
+comparative decay; others, perhaps, are still more or less
+substantial; but the grime of many unpainted years of occupation must,
+one thinks, be more or less conducive to midnight gloom, or even to
+the before-mentioned complaint of "the 'orrors!" And yet, with all
+these drawbacks, do not the suites of rooms in the Inn emanate a
+semi-historic charm, a charm that the newer "flats" can never, never
+possess? Even apart from mere history, places where people have lived
+and experienced and suffered, always, I think, breathe a certain
+humanity.... And I would rather, for my part, have a dinner of herbs
+in Gray's Inn, in a low-roofed panelled parlour, with windows open on
+to the green enclosure below, than enjoy all the dainties of the clubs
+in a "Palace Mansions," with all the newest electric appliances.... I
+would rather hear the dim echoes of the past in the rustle of the
+Gray's Inn elm-trees, or the plash of the Temple Fountain, than boast
+of a theatre agency next door, or live in a West End street of ever so
+desirable people.... I would rather breathe the sweet and solitary
+content of a City quadrangle, than the fevered and stormy dissipation
+of Mayfair ... I would rather....
+
+But the day darkens, and reminds me that I have wandered long enough
+in these City closes. Farewell, old Inns! haunts of ancient peace,
+goodnight! You will, surely, not always remain as you have been in the
+past. For some of you, that all-invading iconoclast, the builder, will
+alter and destroy old landmarks; for others, but few springs, maybe,
+will return to awake and gladden you into green beauty of plane and
+elm. Yet, even then, the memories of past glories will haunt the
+sacred place, and fill it with "a diviner air"; even then, will surely
+never wholly be abolished or destroyed those traditions of former
+greatness that
+
+        "--like the actions of the just,
+  Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE EAST AND THE WEST
+
+     "Behold how far the East is from the West!"
+
+     "A forest of houses, between which ebbs and flows a stream
+     of human faces, with all their varied passions--an awful
+     rush of love, hunger, and hate--for such is
+     London."--_Heine._
+
+
+"To Newton and to Newton's Dog Diamond," says Carlyle, "what a
+different pair of Universes; while the painting on the optical retina
+of both was, most likely, the same." "A distinct Universe," adds
+Thackeray in the same spirit, "walks about under your Hat, and under
+mine." This latter reflection occurs to me often as I walk about
+London, and note all its many "sorts and conditions" of men. There is
+here, especially, everything in the "point of view." From the West to
+the East is a wide difference; yet, between the two, how many minor
+differences?
+
+London, indeed, is hardly like a single city; it is rather like many
+cities rolled into one. Here, more than anywhere else, you realize
+that "it takes all sorts to make a world"; for the inhabitants vary
+quite as widely as do those of foreign countries. It was Disraeli who
+said, with much cynical truth:
+
+     "The courts of two cities do not so differ from one another
+     as the court and the city in their peculiar ways of life and
+     conversation. In short, the inhabitants of St. James's,
+     notwithstanding they live under the same laws, and speak the
+     same language, are a distinct people from those of
+     Cheapside."
+
+[Illustration: _A Railway Bookstall._]
+
+Between the people of the East, and those of the West, it is not
+merely a question of distance; for, as a matter of fact, the two types
+are often closely interwoven. Thus, there is an "East in the West,"
+where, not infrequently, slums and mean streets lie in near
+juxtaposition to squares of lordly pleasure-houses, and where recently
+erected "model dwellings" for workmen flourish in the very hearts of
+the Grosvenor and Cadogan Estates; and there is a "West in the East,"
+as testified by the pleasant wide streets of comfortable roomy houses
+that abound in the near suburbs of East and South London. Yet, it may
+be broadly stated that every part of London has manners peculiar to
+itself, as unvarying, in their way, as were the laws of the Medes and
+Persians; with, also, one principal dividing-line,--that intangible
+line separating the East End from the West End. Here are a few of the
+differences between the two:
+
+The West End has all the money and all the leisure; the East End
+monopolizes most of the labour, and nearly all of the dirt. The West
+End numbers a few thousands of floating population; the East End, a
+million or so of pretty constant inhabitants. Yet, by some strange
+association of ideas, it is to this small "West End" that we allude
+when we speak of "all London," and to which the daily papers refer
+when in August and September they assure us that "there is absolutely
+no one left in town." The manners and customs of each are dissimilar;
+both indulge in slang of a kind; but, while the East End usually cuts
+off the initial letter of its words, the West-End drops the final one.
+The West End is shocked by the East, but then, the East End is just as
+much shocked, for its part, by the West. If the "lady" is full of
+righteous scorn for the "factory hand" who spends her hard-won
+earnings on a feathered hat and a plush cape, the slum-dweller is, on
+the other hand, quite equally scandalized at the "lady's" brazen
+boldness in wearing a _decollete_ dress: "To think of 'er 'avin' the
+fice ter go hout with them nyked showlders, 'ow 'orrid!" the factory
+girl will say, from out the street-door crowd at an evening "crush."
+Even a veiled Turkish lady, from the secluded harem, could hardly show
+more genuine feeling at the unpleasant spectacle. No, our ways are not
+as their ways. Their conventionalities are quite as strict, even
+stricter, than ours. Possibly to them, even our speech sounds just as
+faulty as theirs to us; probably they think us very ill-bred because
+we do not constantly reiterate the words "Mrs. Smith," or "Mrs.
+Jones," when addressing the said ladies; or cry immediately, "Granted,
+Miss, or Sir," in reply to "I beg your pardon!" At any rate, we must,
+to them, seem chilly and unresponsive. Then, the books we read, if
+they understood them, would often greatly shock the slum-dwellers; the
+pictures we hang in our parlours would horrify them. Servants do not
+come from the slums or even from the lowest class; yet I have myself,
+out of regard for their feelings, had to "sky" the most beautiful
+_chefs-d'oeuvre_ of Titian, and turn the photograph of a masterpiece
+by Praxiteles with its face ignominiously to the wall. And it's "'ow
+you can go to that there National Gallery, 'm, and look at them
+pictures of folkses without a rag on 'em, well, it beats me, it do
+indeed!" After all, and once more, the difference is all in "the point
+of view!"
+
+[Illustration: _The City Train._]
+
+But, if the East and the West have their wide and radical differences,
+between the two there are, as I said, many recurring types. And the
+constant Londoner, were he suddenly to be brought, blindfolded, to
+some hitherto unknown spot in the city or near suburbs, would soon
+know his whereabouts by the look of the people he encountered. Thus,
+you may know Bloomsbury by its Jews, as well as by a population
+remarkable for general frowsiness, a look of "ingrained" dirt, and an
+indescribable air of having seen better days; Chelsea, by a certain
+art-serged female, and long-haired male community with an
+artistic,--and, yes,--perhaps a well-pleased and self-satisfied air;
+the "City," by its black-coated business men; Whitechapel, by its
+coster girls with fringes; Somers Town and Lisson Grove, by their
+odoriferous cats and cabbages; Mayfair, by its sleek carriage-horses,
+and also by the very superior maids and butlers you meet in its silent
+streets. Or, perhaps, by the straw that occasionally fills the quiet
+square corners, sounding the sad note of Death. I have seen a slum
+child dying of cancer in a crowded garret,--baked by the August
+sun,--covered with flies,--in a noisy alley; but only rich people's
+nerves require soothing at the last!
+
+Miss Amy Levy has written a haunting little poem on this subject:
+
+  "Straw in the street, where I pass to-day,
+   Dulls the sound of the wheels and feet.
+  'Tis for a failing life they lay
+                            Straw in the street.
+
+  "Here, where the pulses of London beat,
+   Someone strives with the Presence Grey--
+   Ah, is it victory or defeat?
+
+  "The hurrying people go their way,
+   Pause and jostle and pass and greet;
+   For life, for death, are they treading, say,
+                            Straw in the street?"
+
+"London," says a French writer, "resembles, in its size and luxury,
+Ancient Rome." But, if Ancient Rome, he adds, weighed heavily upon
+its toiling slaves, "how heavily does not our modern Rome weigh,
+also, upon the labouring class!" The hanging gardens of Park Lane
+are in as great, and greater contrast to the Somers Town, Drury
+Lane, and Deptford slums, as were ever the Palaces of the Palatine
+to the slaves' quarters. London is the best city in the world to be
+rich in, the worst to be very poor in; as it is the best city for
+happiness, the worst for misery. It is the Temple of Midas, where
+everything,--from a coffin to a hired guest,--from the _entree_ to
+an "exclusive" mansion to a peer's status,--can be bought with
+money. Here, more than anywhere else, money is imperatively needed.
+Even the poor hawkers who live in unspeakable slums, lined with cats
+and cabbages, in Lisson Grove, might, if they lived in the country,
+at least have clean cottages, gardens, and pure air. With the same
+income on which you are poor in town, you will be well-to-do, nay,
+rich in the country. House-rent,--indirect taxation,--the vicinity
+of tempting shops,--and amusements take the surplus. The attractions
+of town must indeed be great to the poor; for, if their wages be
+higher, their life is infinitely lower. But it is the same in all
+classes. It is often said that the rich, who own so many large and
+luxurious country estates, houses, and gardens, are ill-advised to
+come up to town and spend hot Mays and Junes in baking Belgravia or
+Mayfair; but, after all, they only share the tastes of the majority.
+Man is a gregarious animal, and loves his kind. Similarly, if you
+were to make a "house-to-house visitation" in some wretched Lisson
+Grove or East End slum, and inquire diligently of every inhabitant,
+whether they would prefer to "go back and live in the lovely
+country," their answer, I am convinced, would be firmly in the
+negative. East and West are alike in this.
+
+But the key-note of the East End of London, apart from its big
+thoroughfares, is not so much squalor or poverty, as desperate,
+commonplace monotony, such as is described by Mrs. Humphry Ward in
+_Sir George Tressady_, "long lines of low houses,--two storeys always,
+or two storeys and a basement,--all of the same yellowish brick, all
+begrimed by the same smoke, every door-knocker of the same pattern,
+every window-blind hung in the same way, and the same corner 'public'
+on either side, flaming in the hazy distance." The East End is very
+conservative, and in its better houses there is a conservatism even in
+the blinds, which are, almost invariably, of cheap red rep or cloth,
+alternated by dirty "lace." With the poorest tenants, of course,
+blinds are at a discount; and grimy paper fills the frequent holes in
+the panes.
+
+Yet, it is a mistake to suppose, as is more or less the popular
+theory, that the average East Ender's life is all unmitigated gloom.
+Take, for instance, the life of the honest, hard-working artisan and
+his family. He may live in "mean streets"; but use is everything; and
+they are not "mean" to him. Possibly, from his point of view, the
+two-pair back, the frowsy street, are "a sight more homely and cosy"
+than rich people's area gates and chilly grandeur. If the West End
+takes its pleasure by driving in the Park, the East, on the other
+hand, finds its relaxation on the tops of 'buses and trams, in walking
+about the flaring, gas-jetted street, in looking into shop windows, or
+in driving about in all the pride of a private, special coster's cart.
+If the rich do not know how the poor live, the poor, on the other
+hand, have but a hazy idea of how the rich live. If you asked the
+average slum-dweller how the rich spend their day, they would most
+likely say, "in drinking champagne and driving in motor cars." Thus
+the classes mutually do each other injustice. If the poor, for a
+while, could live the life of the rich, they would vote it terribly
+slow; Calverley was not so far out when he suggested slyly that
+
+                        "Unless they've souls that grovel,
+  Folks _prefer_ in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls."
+
+The poor of the East End have their special plays, their theatres,
+their "halls," their cheap popular amusements. And they have other
+minor compensations. They "eat hearty" when they do eat; they do not
+fall ill from dyspepsia or have to go to Carlsbad; or if they do
+suffer from M. Taine's favourite complaint, "the spleen" (which is
+unusual in a working man), they remedy it by a little harmless
+correction of their wives. Or if a poor woman's child is ill, she does
+not suffer for want of medical advice; she bundles it up quickly in a
+shawl, and runs with it to the nearest hospital, where, if the
+authorities are somewhat curt, she at any rate gets plenty of sympathy
+from all the other mothers in the big hospital waiting-room. Even that
+large, shabby crowd that, on visiting-days, await the opening of the
+hospital doors, so unutterably pathetic to the looker-on, is not,
+perhaps, without its alleviations. It is a mercy that we do not all
+like the same thing; and that, while the rich are exclusive, the poor
+will enjoy society of almost any kind: "We shall 'ave to leave our
+lodgin's, 'm, over them nice mews," a poor woman said to me lately, in
+a mournful tone. "The landlord, he's takin' the place down; an' I
+shall miss the 'orses' feet at night, somethin' shockin'; _they was
+sech comp'ny like_." Here, surely, is a case where one man's poison
+may be another man's meat!
+
+As for the children of the working classes, they, unless their parents
+are lazy or given to drink, really have, often, a far better time of
+it, so far as their own actual enjoyment is concerned, than the more
+repressed children of the rich. The pavement is their property, the
+streets are their world; the beautiful, dazzling, magical,
+ever-changing streets, with their myriad attractions, their boundless
+possibilities. Then, the children of the poor are not brought up as
+useless luxuries, but, from tender years, are required to contribute
+their share of help to the household; and what the average child loves
+above all things is to feel itself of use. Dirt and grime are of no
+account whatever to the child; and old clothes are always far more
+comfortable than new to play about in. The "shades of the prison
+house" may close in, later, about the children of the poor, when they
+must go to service, to the factory, to the shop; but, in their early
+years, their life has its attractions.
+
+Of course, however, with the families of the drunkard, the shiftless,
+the lazy, the case becomes altogether different. Drifting hopelessly
+from one slum to another, these soon help to swell the sad ranks of
+the "submerged tenth": poor creatures whose misery shivers in fireless
+garrets and damp cellars, whose empty stomachs call in vain for food;
+and whose only outlook is the workhouse, the "big villa" as they call
+it; an institution, however, that they will only enter from dire
+necessity, regarding it, as a rule, with wholesome dislike and
+disfavour.
+
+There are many churches and chapels all over London, yet the very poor
+rarely attend any of them. Indeed, very few London working men's wives
+attend any religious service, unless, that is, they happen to boast of
+a new hat or bonnet.... They will, however, receive the "visitor" or
+"tract-lady" with a sort of chilly grandeur; and, though their
+acquaintance with Holy Writ is generally slight, through all life's
+troubles their favourite text is ever this: "It is easier for a camel
+to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the
+Kingdom of Heaven." Thus, they are always, so to speak, comforting
+themselves for the enforced payment of the insurance of hard work and
+poor fare in this life by the assurance of paid-up capital with
+interest, in the next! Poor, hard-worked mothers of the slums! who
+would grudge you that harmless and unfailing consolation?
+
+[Illustration: _Bank Holiday._]
+
+Nor is the "country,"--except in strictly limited quantities,--such an
+unfailing consolation to the children of the poor, as some would have
+us imagine. (That it is such a priceless advantage to their health is,
+no doubt, partly owing to the fact that it is generally associated
+with good and wholesome food.) The children like the "real country"
+for a day or two;--afterwards, they are too often conscious of slight
+boredom. At first, they delight in the fact that "it's so green all
+rarnd,--right to the sky,--with no roads, and no walls,--and no
+trespsin boards,--and no pleecemen;" but these joys have their
+limitations,--and, after a fortnight's holiday,--even poor slum
+children are generally glad to get back home. Even in tender
+youth,--the country is a cult that requires some learning. "The
+country is dreadful slow,"--a little girl of the great city once
+remarked with painful frankness,--"no swings, no rahnd-abarts, no
+penny-ice men, no orgins, no shops, no nothink;--jest a great bare
+field only." Here, again, is the difference of "the point of view!"
+
+Go into that glittering Armida-Palace, the busy Whitechapel Road, and
+watch the scene at nightfall. The weather may be cold or mirk; the
+weather matters little; the skies may be glum and starless, but a
+galaxy of light, from innumerable gas jets and shop fronts, floods the
+busy street. Here is, certainly, no lack of life and amusement; the
+crowd laughs, jostles, and chatters, as if no such thing as care or
+struggle existed. It is a motley crowd. Handsome dark-eyed Jewesses
+with floppy hair and long gold earrings; coster girls "on the spree,"
+dressed in their gaudy best; staid couples doing their weekly
+marketing; here and there a happy family round a stall, eating
+"winkles" composedly with the help of pins, or demolishing saucerfuls
+of the savoury cockle; vendors of penny toys; all these, combined with
+the voluble "patter" of the lively shop-boys, make a veritable
+pandemonium. Shops are full; barrows of all kinds drive a brisk trade;
+velvet-cushioned trams ply up and down the big highway, which extends,
+apparently almost into infinity, up the long Mile End Road.
+(Tram-lines, in London, seem more or less confined to the uninspiring
+North and East and their suburbs.) Ugly and uninvigorating enough by
+day, the streets, by night, invest themselves with mysterious glamour
+and brightness. Like some murky theatre when the deceiving footlights
+are lit, this, too, is a "stage illusion," and it is a wise one. For
+all the East End does its shopping by gaslight; now only it begins to
+enjoy its day. Seen in such kaleidoscopic glare of light, even the
+Whitechapel Road has its attractions. Yet through it all one sometimes
+sees sad sights. Many public-houses dot these thoroughfares, shining
+like meteors through the nocturnal mists; and here and there, truth
+to tell, a bevy of red-faced women may be seen through the
+plate-glass, whose unhappy infants are stationed in shabby
+perambulators outside; their eyes, by dint of vain straining towards
+their natural guardians, painfully acquiring that squint that would
+seem to be the birthright of so many of the London poor.
+
+In strange contrast with the din and bustle of Aldgate and its network
+of wide streets, are the collegiate buildings of Toynbee Hall, in
+Commercial Street, close by. This is a curious little oasis in the
+wilderness, a most unexpected by-way in busy, glaring Whitechapel. To
+Canon and Mrs. Barnett, who have devoted their lives towards making
+Toynbee Hall what it is, is due the chief honour for the successful
+working of this Institution, primarily intended to bring "sweetness
+and light" into the darkened, unlovely lives of the London poor. The
+name of Arnold Toynbee, the young and enthusiastic Oxford man and
+reformer, has been immortalised in this place, the first of the
+University Settlements in London. Toynbee died young, of overwork and
+overpressure; in a sense a martyr to his cause; yet the work of this
+latter-day apostle has already had large results, and his creed has
+had many followers. To him, dying in his youthful zeal, Tennyson's
+lines seem specially appropriate:
+
+  "So many worlds, so much to do,
+      So little done, such things to be,
+      How know I what had need of thee,
+   For thou wert strong as thou wert true?
+   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+  "O hollow wraith of dying fame,
+      Fade wholly, while the soul exults,
+      And self-infolds the large results
+   Of force that would have forged a name."
+
+In some ways, Toynbee Hall, and its successive, and kindred
+institutions, seem like late revivals of the monastic system of the
+middle ages. Toynbee Hall is a hall in the academic sense,--and
+shelters successive batches of some twenty residents,--young
+university men of strong convictions,--who come here both to learn and
+to teach;--to teach their less fortunate brothers,--to learn how the
+poor live. At its hospitable door the sick and suffering apply for
+help and succour; here charity,--charity, too, of the kind that
+"blesseth him that gives and him that takes,"--is freely
+given,--without narrow restrictions of sectarianism or dogma--and it
+does more than this.
+
+For,--unlike the monastic system,--Toynbee Hall is specially devised to
+help the individual soul of the poor worker in busy London to rise above
+its often base and mean surroundings. The late Matthew Arnold, in his
+well-remembered lecture at Toynbee Hall,--taught the possibility of
+"following the gleam" even in the "gloom" of the East-End,--and of
+helping Nature, by the aid of books and of art, from sinking under
+"long-lived pressure of obscure distress." Books and art are great
+tonics. The ancient monasteries dissuaded,--if anything,--knowledge, and
+aspiration generally, in the "masses": Toynbee Hall encourages and
+promotes it; it is thus a physician to the mind even more than to the
+body. It raises the aims, improves the tastes, and widens the horizons
+of its disciples; it satisfies the cravings of the poor for better
+things; but it must first inculcate such cravings. Within its walls the
+poor and struggling artisan may enjoy concerts, lectures, pictures;--may
+learn, too, from the best teachers,--and profit by many of the
+advantages of university life. There are not only lecture-rooms, but
+reception-rooms,--dining-rooms,--a library;--the latter a much-valued
+institution in the neighbourhood. Many pleasant social gatherings are
+held here;--not only of working men,--but also of factory
+girls,--shop-hands,--pupil-teachers,--who come here,--these latter,--to
+cast off the "codes" and dry bones of learning, and acquire a little of
+its warmer, fuller humanity.
+
+Toynbee Hall is not the only place in East London where such works
+are carried on. Oxford House, Bethnal Green,--and Mansfield House,
+Canning Town,--are, among others,--institutions more or less of the
+kind; and the Passmore Edwards Institute, in Tavistock Place, has
+similar aims. But to Toynbee Hall is due the introduction of yearly
+loan Exhibitions of good pictures for the East End,--originated by
+Canon Barnett, and still successfully carried on by his unwearying
+exertions.
+
+The charms of poetic contrast are always great in London. While
+standing in a dingy byway of some city church--St. Olave's, Hart
+Street, or St. Jude's, Whitechapel,--does not the deep music of the
+organ,--resounding from inside the building,--fill the listener with a
+strange feeling almost akin to tears? Not even outside a country
+church is one so affected. Here it seems to bring the calm of Eternity
+into the fitful fever of the moment. The picturesqueness, alone, of
+religion, is so great, that, to the determined agnostic London would
+surely lose half its charm. And who could work among the London poor
+without, at least, something of the feeling so beautifully expressed
+in Matthew Arnold's well-known lines?
+
+  "'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
+       Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
+       And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
+   In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited.
+
+  "I met a preacher there I knew, and said:
+      'Ill and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene?'--
+      'Bravely!' said he; 'for I of late have been
+   Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, _the living bread_.'
+
+  "O human soul! as long as thou canst so
+   Set up a mark of everlasting light,
+   Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,
+
+   To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam--
+   Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
+   Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home."
+
+Toynbee Hall, of course, is of modern design; but there are still many
+good old-time houses in the East-end,--now deserted and left stranded
+by the tide of fashion. Of these is Essex House, in the Mile-End-Road,
+(opposite Burdett-Road), now no longer residential, but used by Mr.
+Ashbee as the convenient location for his well-known "Guild and School
+of Handicraft." Built partly by a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, with
+panelled rooms, oak staircase, and large garden, its solid dignity is
+well suited to its new and living purpose. Mr. Ashbee,--the founder
+and moving spirit of the Guild--was himself a worker at Toynbee Hall,
+where, indeed, in a small "Ruskin class" held in 1886-7, the school
+had its beginning. So one thing grows out of another, and a sturdy
+plant sends out its offshoots.
+
+Thus Toynbee Hall, and kindred institutions, show the West-end in the
+East; now let us turn to the East-end in the West. This is not so
+difficult to find; "the poor," indeed, "we have always with us," and
+in some of London's most fashionable streets the saddest sights of all
+may be seen. Slums of a sort are to be found near most of the
+fashionable West-end squares; and, even within the precincts of
+aristocratic Mayfair, the expensive fish-shop in Bond-Street,--where,
+during long summer days, enormous blocks of ice, tempting to the eye,
+glitter like some Rajah's diamond,--entertains a motley crew of poor
+folk on Saturday nights, when it makes a practice of giving away its
+remaining stock. Bond Street is, in a manner, the "Aldgate High
+Street" of the fashionable world: here, at four o'clock or so in the
+afternoon, are to be seen the "gilded youth,"--the dandies of the
+day;--here the smart world flock for afternoon tea; and here fine
+ladies walk even unattended, and satisfy, as eagerly as their
+Whitechapel sisters, their feminine cravings for shop-windows. Who was
+it who first said that no real woman could ever pass a hat-shop? The
+truth of this remark may here be attested. The very smartest of
+motor-cars,--of horses,--of "turn-outs" generally,--may be seen
+blocking the narrow Piccadilly entrance of this thoroughfare from
+which deviates as many mysterious byways as from Cheapside itself.
+Very much sought after are all these tiny streets; indeed, the tide of
+fashion has been ever faithful to this special part of the metropolis.
+Did not Swift once write to "Stella," of the neighbouring Bury Street;
+"I have a first floor, a dining-room and bedroom, at eight shillings a
+week,--and plaguey dear!"? But,--even considering the vast difference
+in money value since Swift's day,--we have to pay a good deal more
+than that now for similar accommodation in this quarter.
+
+But, yet further West, between Bond Street and Hyde Park, are
+Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, the very focus of fashion, in whose
+neighbourhood rents rise proportionately. Here, too, are many
+unexpected and charming byways. Behind the vestry in Mount Street, for
+instance, in the passage that leads into the church in Farm Street,
+you might think yourself thousands of miles away from Mayfair. This
+church in Farm Street,--the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate
+Conception,--is famous as a Jesuit centre; here it was that Henry
+Manning, afterwards Cardinal, was "received" on Passion Sunday, 1851.
+
+Other byways there are, too, of a less attractive kind; the byways
+where dwell the "poor relations," so to speak, of the Aristocracy and
+the "Smart Set"; the impoverished ladies whose sense of propriety
+would lead them to dwell even in a wheelbarrow, could that wheelbarrow
+only be drawn up on the fashionable side of the street! They are
+"backmewsy" little streets of saddening aspect, such as Dickens's
+typical "Mews Street, Grosvenor Square," that contained the residence
+of Mr. Tite Barnacle, with "squeezed houses," each with "a ramshackle
+bowed front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp
+waistcoat pocket" ... the house a sort of bottle filled with a strong
+distillation of mews, so that when the footman opened the door, he
+"seemed to take the stopper out." Dickens's picture is still a
+portrait that many will recognise:
+
+     "Mews Street, Grosvenor Square, was not absolutely Grosvenor
+     Square itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous
+     little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with
+     lofts over coach-houses inhabited by coachmen's families,
+     who had a passion for drying clothes, and decorating their
+     window-sills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal
+     chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind
+     end of Mews Street; and the same corner contained an
+     establishment much frequented about early morning and
+     twilight, for the purchase of wine-bottles and
+     kitchen-stuff. Punch's shows used to lean against the dead
+     wall in Mews Street, while their proprietors were dining
+     elsewhere; and the dogs of the neighbourhood made
+     appointments to meet in the same locality. Yet there were
+     two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of
+     Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of
+     their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation;
+     and whenever one of these fearful little coops was to be let
+     (which seldom happened, for they were in great request), the
+     house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence in the
+     most aristocratic part of town, inhabited solely by the
+     elite of the _beau monde_."
+
+But to the millionaire's dwelling, located at that period in Harley
+Street, Cavendish-Square, the novelist is hardly more polite:
+
+     "Like unexceptionable society" (he says), "the opposing rows
+     of houses in Harley Street were very grim with one another.
+     Indeed, the mansions and their inhabitants were so much
+     alike in that respect, that the people were often to be
+     found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner-tables, in the
+     shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of
+     the way with the dullness of the houses. Everybody knows how
+     like the street the two dinner-rows of people who take their
+     stand by the street will be. The expressionless uniform
+     twenty houses, all to be knocked and rung at in the same
+     form, all approachable by the same dull steps, all fended
+     off by the same pattern of railing, all with the same
+     impracticable fire-escapes, the same inconvenient fixtures
+     in their heads, and everything without exception to be taken
+     at a high valuation--who has not dined with these? The house
+     so drearily out of repair, the occasional bow-window, the
+     stuccoed house, the newly-fronted house, the corner house
+     with nothing but angular rooms, the house with the blinds
+     always down, the house with the hatchment always up, the
+     house where the collector has called for one quarter of an
+     Idea, and found nobody at home--who has not dined with
+     these?"
+
+Dickens, on the whole, is kinder to his thieves' kitchens and debtors'
+prisons, even to Fagin and his crew; for he allows them, at any rate,
+to boast occasionally of an "Idea." But the "Smart Set," with the
+plutocrats and the Merdles, has moved westward since the days of the
+Early-Victorian novelists; and "Harley Street, Cavendish Square," is
+now mainly medical.
+
+The smart ladies often seen shopping in Bond Street from neat
+broughams and landaus, drawn by high-stepping horses, are mainly
+people whose names figure largely in the so-called "society" papers;
+their goings and comings, be they aristocratic or theatrical, are all,
+therefore, carefully noted by the ubiquitous "lady reporter;" terrible
+fate of the well-known or well-born! But it is an age of
+advertisement; and who shall say entirely on which side the fault
+lies? Where these leaders of society shop now, other generations of
+fair dead ladies, gone "with the snows of yesteryear," have in their
+turn enjoyed the dear delights of lace, millinery, and jewels. Here
+the "ladies of St. James's," in the eighteenth century, revelled in
+their "lutestrings," "dimitys," "paduasoys"; and, to flaunt it over
+their less fortunate sisters, bought the very newest new thing in
+turbans. Piccadilly, doubtless, looked a trifle brighter and smarter
+in those days of less smoke, as befitted the "court end of the town;"
+and the young "swells" of the day presented a braver array in their
+laces, ruffles, and knee-breeches. Then, as now, the Holbein-like Gate
+of St. James's Palace, dignified in sober red-brick, stood sentinel at
+the bottom of St. James's Street,--the street thus alluded to by
+Sheridan:
+
+  "The Campus Martius of St. James's Street,
+   Where the beaux' cavalry pace to and fro,
+   Before they take the field in Rotten Row."
+
+[Illustration: _In Regent Street._]
+
+St. James's Street, with all its byways and purlieus, has always been
+greatly in request for exclusive and smart clubs, as well as for
+bachelors' lodgings of the luxurious kind. It has also literary
+associations. St. James's Place, where Addison lived, was also noted
+for the residence of the old banker-poet Samuel Rogers; this was his
+home for fifty-five years, and here, at No. 22, he gave his famous
+"literary breakfasts." Of old the most exclusive gathering in this
+region was "Almack's," ruled by the famous Lady Jersey, "the seventh
+heaven of the fashionable world." It is situated in King Street, and
+is now "Willis's Rooms." St. James's, as a rule, is "exclusive" enough
+still; but the neighbourhood has in other ways gone through many
+changes. The great house built by Nash for the Regent,--Carlton House,
+beyond Pall Mall,--has vanished like Aladdin's Palace, and has left in
+its place only one big column, a flight of noble steps, and a stately
+terrace of palatial mansions,--Carlton-House-Terrace, overlooking the
+Mall. This Phoenix-like spirit of London, ever rising anew on its own
+ashes, was always dear to Thackeray. Here is one of his inimitable
+passages on the subject, thrown off at random:
+
+     "... I remember peeping through the colonnade at Carlton
+     House, and seeing the abode of the great Prince Regent. I
+     can see yet the Guards pacing before the gates of the place.
+     The place? What place? The palace exists no more than the
+     palace of Nebuchadnezzar. It is but a name now. Where be the
+     sentries who used to salute as the Royal chariots drove in
+     and out? "The chariots, with the kings inside, have driven
+     to the realms of Pluto; the tall Guards have marched into
+     darkness, and the echoes of their drums are rolling in
+     Hades." Where the palace once stood, a hundred little
+     children are paddling up and down the steps to St. James's
+     Park. A score of grave gentlemen are taking their tea at the
+     Athenaeum Club; as many grisly warriors are garrisoning the
+     United Service Club opposite. Pall Mall is the great social
+     Exchange of London now--the mart of news, of politics, of
+     scandal, of rumour--the English forum, so to speak, where
+     men discuss the last despatch from the Crimea, the last
+     speech of Lord Derby, the next move of Lord John. And, now
+     and then, to a few antiquarians, whose thoughts are with the
+     past rather than with the present, it is a memorial of old
+     times and old people, and Pall Mall is our Palmyra. Look!
+     About this spot, Tom of Ten Thousand was killed by
+     Koenigsmarck's gang. In that red house Gainsborough lived,
+     and Culloden Cumberland, George III.'s uncle. Yonder is
+     Sarah Marlborough's palace, just as it stood when that
+     termagant occupied it. At 25, Walter Scott used to live; at
+     the house, now No. 79, and occupied by the Society for the
+     Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, resided Mrs.
+     Eleanor Gwynn, comedian. How often has Queen Caroline's
+     chair issued from under yonder arch! All the men of the
+     Georges have passed up and down the street. It has seen
+     Walpole's chariot and Chatham's sedan; and Fox, Gibbon,
+     Sheridan, on their way to Brookes's; and stately William
+     Pitt stalking on the arm of Dundas; and Hanger and Tom
+     Sheridan reeling out of Raggett's; and Byron limping into
+     Wattier's; and Swift striding out of Bury Street; and Mr.
+     Addison and Dick Steele, both perhaps a little the better
+     for liquor; and the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York
+     clattering over the pavement; and Johnson counting the posts
+     along the streets, after dawdling before Dodsley's window;
+     and Horry Walpole hobbling into his carriage, with a
+     gimcrack just bought out at Christie's; and George Selwyn
+     sauntering into White's."--Thackeray: _The Four Georges_, p.
+     72.
+
+[Illustration: _Piccadilly._]
+
+Pall Mall, the street of palaces and palatial clubs _par excellence_,
+is one of London's handsomest highways. It has for three centuries
+been the Fleet Street of the well-to-do poets, of the leisured
+literary world; for what, indeed, could poverty ever have in common
+with Pall Mall? Defoe, in his day, wrote thus of it:
+
+     "I am lodged in the street called Pall Mall, the ordinary
+     residence of all strangers, because of its vicinity to the
+     Queen's Palace, the Park, the Parliament House, the
+     theatres, and the chocolate and coffee houses, where the
+     best company frequent. If you would know our manner of
+     living, 'tis thus:--We rise by nine, and those that frequent
+     great men's levees find entertainment at them till eleven,
+     or, as at Holland, go to tea tables. About twelve, the
+     _beau-monde_ assembles in several coffee or chocolate
+     houses; the best of which are the Cocoa Tree and White's
+     chocolate houses, St. James's, the Smyrna, Mr. Rochford's,
+     and the British coffee houses; and all these so near one
+     another that in less than one hour you see the company of
+     them all."
+
+This sounds, truly, a pleasant enough life;--and its counterpart of
+the present day is,--allowing for altered customs,--no doubt equally
+pleasant. The taverns mentioned have given place to spacious
+club-houses, all more or less modern; and the day has, in the last two
+centuries, come to begin earlier and end later. Coffee-houses, in
+Defoe's time, were the necessary ladders to rising fame talent; thus,
+the boy Chatterton, starving and unknown in cruel London, sought to
+allay his mother's anxiety by writing to her: "I am quite familiar at
+the Chapter coffee-house (St. Paul's), and know all the geniuses
+there."
+
+In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Pall Mall was a pretty
+suburban promenade, and its "sweet shady side," sung by the poets, was
+really no misnomer, as a row of elms fringed it, both north and
+south. And it is still an aristocratic region, despite the "business"
+air that has of late invaded it. Of the people you meet here,--elderly
+gentlemen with nothing, perhaps, very remarkable about them, to
+outward view;--or smart young men, with well-polished boots and hats,
+and faultless dress-coats,--it is safe to say that a fair number will
+have distinguished themselves in one way or another; either in the
+working of their country's government, or in the fighting of their
+country's battles. But, here as elsewhere, England is uncommunicative,
+and you may pass angels unawares.
+
+Just behind Pall Mall is the aristocratic St. James's Square--already,
+alas! invaded by the modern builder:
+
+  "She shall have all that's fine and fair,
+   And ride in a coach to take the air,
+   And have a house in St. James's Square,"--
+
+--runs the old ballad. Though St. James's Square now contains a fair
+sprinkling of Government and other offices,--yet its clientele is
+still somewhat ducal. Nevertheless, this Square, too, recalls
+something of the seamy side of life. "What," says Lord Rosebery,
+referring to London's many associations, "can be less imposing, or
+less interesting in themselves,--than the railings of St. James's
+Square? Yet, you cannot touch those railings--hideous as they are and
+dull as are the houses that surround them--without thinking that
+Johnson and Savage, hungry boys, starved by their kind mother, London,
+who attracted men of letters to her, walked round that square one
+summer night and swore they would die for their country."
+
+Yes,--this, in some way, seems "the best of all possible worlds,"--and
+London, in such surroundings, the best of all possible cities to live
+in. Yet, here, too, the East is still present in the West. Round the
+corner, as I gaze, comes a pitiful group,--a tawdry woman, her voice
+raucous and suggestive of gin, holding by the hand two children, a
+boy and a girl,--all singing, or making believe to sing, in chorus:
+
+  "'Ark! ar ark, my sowl! Angelic songs are swellin',
+    From Hearth's green fields--and Hoceant's way-be shore--
+   'Ark, ar-ark,--"
+
+Alas! the notes are hardly suggestive of angelic visitants. The chubby
+little boy is crying, the tears making streaky marks down his dirty
+little face. "I'm so cowld, so cowld, mammy," "'Owld yer
+row!"--admonishes his sister, in the intervals of her husky
+accompaniment.... The sodden voice of the mother is so terrible that I
+am moved to give her a shilling to go away and remove her poor
+suffering babies.... But,--at the angle of Waterloo Place,--another
+phantom is stationed; a wretchedly-clothed creature, evidently on the
+look-out for a job. He might himself be an incarnation of Famine. His
+cheeks are hollow and cadaverous; his eyes are dulled and hopeless; he
+shivers in the bleak raw December air;--in the "best of all possible
+worlds,--the richest of all possible cities".... The mere "cab-horse's
+charter" is not for such as he! Ungrateful country, that deals so ill
+with her children, giving them too often "stones for bread!"
+
+     "If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the
+     enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a
+     London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted,
+     and through their gap the nearest human beings who were
+     famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the
+     company--feasting and fancy-free--if, pale with sickness,
+     horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body,
+     they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of
+     every guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast
+     to them--would only a passing glance, a passing thought be
+     vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real relations
+     of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the
+     intervention of the house wall between the table and the
+     sick-bed--by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are
+     indeed all that separate the merriment from the misery."
+
+It is an effective contrast. But, perhaps the most vivid and pathetic
+sketch of the Submerged of the Great City is that of John Davidson's
+weird and haunting ballad: "The Loafer":
+
+  "I hang about the streets all day,
+      At night I hang about;
+   I sleep a little when I may,
+      But rise betimes the morning's scout;
+   For through the year I always hear
+      Afar, aloft, a ghostly shout.
+
+  "My clothes are worn to threads and loops;
+      My skin shows here and there;
+   About my face like seaweed droops
+      My tangled beard, my tangled hair;
+   From cavernous and shaggy brows
+      My stony eyes untroubled stare.
+
+  "I move from eastern wretchedness
+      Through Fleet Street and the Strand;
+   And as the pleasant people press
+      I touch them softly with my hand,
+   Perhaps to know that still I go
+      Alive about a living land.
+
+  "I know no handicraft, no art,
+      But I have conquered fate;
+   For I have chosen the better part,
+      And neither hope, nor fear, nor hate.
+   With placid breath on pain and death,
+      My certain alms, alone I wait."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Speshul!_]
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+WESTMINSTER
+
+     "The devout King destined to God that place, both for that
+     it was near unto the famous and wealthy City of London, and
+     also had a pleasant situation amongst fruitful fields lying
+     round about it, with the principal river running hard by,
+     bringing in from all parts of the world great variety of
+     wares and merchandise of all sorts to the city adjoining;
+     but chiefly for the love of the Chief Apostle, whom he
+     reverenced with a special and singular
+     affection."--_Contemporary Life of Edward the Confessor in
+     Harleian M.S._
+
+     "The world-famed Abbey by the westering Thames."--_Matthew
+     Arnold._
+
+
+"Westminster Abbey," said Dean Stanley, "stands alone amongst the
+buildings of the world. There are, it may be, some which surpass it in
+beauty or grandeur; there are others, certainly, which surpass it in
+depth and sublimity of association; but there is none which has been
+entwined by so many continuous threads with the history of a whole
+nation."
+
+The old Abbey of Westminster, is, indeed, in itself an epitome of
+English history. Elsewhere in London, you must dig and delve for it,
+study and reconstruct; here, you have it all together, a chain in a
+manner unbroken, from Edward the Confessor to the latest of our
+Hanoverian Kings, crowned here, so lately and so splendidly, in the
+place of his fathers.
+
+The church has, in a manner, been founded many times; by tradition, by
+rebuilding, by frequent restoration and enlargement. The earliest
+church, or temple, on this ancient site is, indeed, almost lost in the
+semi-fabulous mists of early history. To all famous fanes, the
+after-years have a tendency to ascribe legendary and miraculous
+beginnings; thus, the magic haze that surrounds the primitive church
+of the doubtful Saxon King Lucius is hardly less than that covering
+the Temple of Apollo, the Sun-god, said to exist here in Roman times.
+At any rate, it is clear that on this favoured spot, once the little
+sandy peninsula of "Thorney Island," was an early sanctuary and
+settlement, both Roman and Briton. In King Sebert's time the mists of
+antiquity lift, but still slightly. Sebert, King of the East-Saxons,
+was, early in the seventh century, the traditionary founder of a
+church here, dedicated to St. Peter. According to the story, Sebert,
+just returned from a Roman pilgrimage, was about to have his church
+consecrated by the bishop, Mellitus; when, one evening, a poor Saxon
+fisher, Edric, who was watching his nets along the shore, saw, on the
+opposite river bank, a gleaming light, and, approaching it in his
+boat, found a venerable man who desired to be ferried across the
+stream. There, the mysterious stranger landed, and proceeded to the
+church, where, transfigured with light, and attended by hosts of
+glittering angels, he consecrated it, being, indeed, no other than St.
+Peter himself:
+
+         "Then all again is dark;
+          And by the fisher's bark
+      The unknown passenger returning stands.
+         _O Saxon fisher! thou hast had with thee_
+         _The fisher from the Lake of Galilee_--
+
+     "So saith he, blessing him with outspread hands;
+          Then fades, but speaks the while:
+     _At dawn thou to King Sebert shalt relate_
+         _How his St. Peter's Church in Thorney Isle,_
+     _Peter, his friend, with light did consecrate._"
+
+The chronicle relates the story thus:
+
+     "Know, O Edric," said the stranger, while the fisherman's
+     heart glowed within him, "know that I am Peter. I have
+     hallowed the church myself. To-morrow I charge thee that
+     thou tell these things to the Bishop, who will find a sign
+     and token in the church of my hallowing. And for another
+     token, put forth again upon the river, cast thy nets, and
+     thou shalt receive so great a draught of fishes that there
+     will be no doubt left in thy mind. But give one-tenth to
+     this my holy church."
+
+The story continues that Bishop Mellitus, on hearing Edric's
+miraculous tale, changed the name of the place from Thorney Isle to
+West Minster.
+
+The tomb of the first traditionary founder of St. Peter's church of
+Westminster is still shown in the Abbey to-day, as it has been shown
+ever since the time of its erection. Through all the vicissitudes of
+the Abbey, its many alterations and restorations, this early relic has
+always been treated carefully and with respect. The King of the
+East-Saxons sleeps in peace in the choir, with his wife Ethelgoda and
+his sister Ricula, first of a long line of kings and potentates.
+
+But if Sebert was the traditional founder of the Abbey, Edward the
+Confessor was, unquestionably, its real founder. And, for that matter,
+the legends that surround the mysterious Sebert still linger, like a
+halo, round the Confessor's memory; he who was, we are told, so
+saintly, that being one day at mass in the ancient minster, he saw
+"the Saviour appear as a child, bright and pure as a spirit." Truly, a
+picturesque age to live in! The rebuilding of the Confessor's church
+was, as in the later time of Rahere, the outcome of a vision, and of a
+direct message from the saint. Edward, said St. Peter, must rebuild
+the ancient minster of Thorney. Edward rebuilt it, laying the
+foundation stone in 1049, and naming it "the Collegiate Church of St.
+Peter of Westminster." It was the work of the King's life, and it was
+only consecrated eight days before his death. Of the Confessor's
+chapel and monastery all that now remains is the present "Chapel of
+the Pyx," with portions of the Westminster School Buildings and of the
+walls of the South Cloister. For Henry III., the Abbey's second
+founder, who had "a rare taste for building" pulled down, in 1245,
+most of his predecessor's work, and made the splendid miracle-working
+shrine that contains the relics of the royal saint. But it was Henry
+VII., in 1502, who was the great builder and transformer of the Abbey.
+To him we owe the fine perpendicular chapel called by his name, "the
+most beautiful chapel in the world," the one building that impresses,
+at first sight, every visitor to London. Westminster Abbey, as we see
+it now, is probably in externals much as Henry VII. left it, except
+for the addition of Wren's two western towers, and "the fact that in
+the middle ages it was a magnificent apex to a royal palace,"
+surrounded "by a train of subordinate offices and buildings, and with
+lands extending to the present Oxford Street, Fleet Street, and
+Vauxhall."
+
+Yet, without any of its former palatial accessories, is not the gray
+fret-work of Henry VIIth's chapel, as it breaks on the delighted
+vision of the traveller down Whitehall, an ever-renewed joy and
+wonder? To Henry Tudor we owe the union of the houses of York and
+Lancaster; yet we remember him far more by this, the chapel that he
+has given us for all time. Truly, he too must have had "a rare taste
+in building!" "It is to the exaltation of the building art," says Mr.
+Ruskin, in an eloquent passage, "that we owe:
+
+     --"those vaulted gates ... those window-labyrinths of
+     twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of
+     multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only
+     witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear
+     of nations. All else for which the builders sacrificed, has
+     passed away--all their living interests, and aims, and
+     achievements. We know not for what they laboured, and we see
+     no evidence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority,
+     happiness--all have departed, though bought by many a bitter
+     sacrifice. But of them, and their life and their toil upon
+     the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those
+     gray heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them
+     to the grave their powers, their honours, and their errors;
+     but they have left us their adoration."
+
+But, apart from the beauty of its architecture, apart from the
+associations and traditions of its early history, apart from its
+honour as the place of coronations, the feeling that every true
+Englishman has for the Abbey of Westminster must necessarily be
+strong; for it represents to him not only the essential spirit of his
+mother-city; it is also, in a sense, his national Valhalla,
+
+                    --"place of tombs,
+  Where lie the mighty bones of ancient men."--
+
+Here, in this "cathedral close of Westminster," is his true
+fatherland. This, he may say, is his national Holy of Holies; the
+sacred spot:
+
+  "Wo meine Traueme wandeln gehn,
+   Wo meine Todten aufersteh'n."
+
+Here he may feel all the reverence, all the love for his country, that
+is ever the birthright of the true citizen. For, not only kings,
+queens, and nobles, but also the great and mighty in art, science,
+literature, are buried within this narrow space. It is England's
+Temple of Fame, her crowing glory of a life of honour and merit. The
+"immortal dead" are thus in their death brought near to each one of
+us, and become part of our special family. They are our national
+inheritance.
+
+Westminster Abbey is "the silent meeting-place of the dead of eight
+centuries," the "great temple of silence and reconciliation where the
+enmities of twenty generations lie buried." Death is ever the great
+peacemaker. Round the mediaeval shrine of Edward the Confessor, in its
+faded and rifled splendour, lie, in a closely-joined circle, the
+peaceful Tombs of the Kings; sturdy Plantagenets, their warfare
+ended, the features of their effigies composed in an eternal calm.
+They sleep well, after life's fitful fever! In Henry VIIth's chapel,
+Mary and Elizabeth, sisters of bitter hate and strange destiny, rest
+together in a contracted sepulchre, admitting of none other occupant
+but they two. "The sisters are at one; the daughter of Catherine of
+Aragon and the daughter of Anne Boleyn repose in peace at last." On
+their monument is the striking inscription: an inscription placed
+there by James I.; "closing," said Dean Stanley, "the long war of the
+English Reformation;" "Regno consortes et urna, hic obdormimus
+Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis." And those great
+statesmen of a later age, Pitt and Fox, their life-long rivalry ended,
+rest in the north transept, dying in the same year, and buried close
+together:
+
+  "Here--taming thought to human pride--
+   The mighty chiefs sleep side by side.
+   Drop upon Fox's grave the tear,
+  'Twill trickle to his rival's bier;
+   O'er Pitt's the mournful requiem sound,
+   And Fox's shall the notes rebound.
+   The solemn echo seems to cry--
+  'Here let their discord with them die.'"
+
+The figure of William Pitt, Lord Chatham, in parliamentary robes, his
+arm outstretched as if speaking, rises high above the surrounding
+monuments:
+
+     "High over those venerable graves," says Macaulay, "towers
+     the stately monument of Chatham, and from above, his effigy,
+     graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face and
+     outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to
+     hurl defiance at her foes."
+
+In another splendid passage, Macaulay describes the later burial of
+the son near the father:
+
+     "The grave of Pitt had been made near to the spot where his
+     great father lay, near also to the spot where his great
+     rival was soon to lie.... Wilberforce, who carried the
+     banner before the hearse, described the awful ceremony with
+     deep feeling. As the coffin descended into the earth, he
+     said, the eagle face of Chatham from above seemed to look
+     down with consternation into the dark house which was
+     receiving all that remained of so much power and glory."
+
+"The silence of death," says Dean Stanley, "breathes here the lesson
+which the tumult of life hardly suffered to be heard."
+
+As, then, the Appian Way was to the Romans, so is Westminster Abbey to
+us, our "Highway of Tombs." As the stranger walks along the vast Nave
+and the Transepts, he passes through a veritable City of the Dead,
+commemorated here by every kind of monument, statue, bust, tablet,
+cenotaph, tomb. Here are now no more the simple tombs and effigies of
+the earliest time, no more the rich, imposing magnificence of the
+mediaeval shrines, but a later efflorescence of sculpture and ornament,
+an efflorescence differing as widely from the severity of former ages,
+as the laudatory epitaphs differ from the simplicity and humility of
+the early inscriptions. Justice and Mercy, Neptune and Britannia,
+cherubs and clouds, are generally very painfully in evidence, and in
+their vast size and depressing ubiquity testify to the false taste of
+their day. Nor are the monuments always deserved. "Some day," said
+Carlyle, cynically, "there will be a terrible gaol-delivery in
+Westminster Abbey!" The worst of such theatrical sculpture is, also,
+that it always takes up so much room; we, in our day, should often be
+glad of the space of one cloudlet,--of one unnecessary virtue,--for
+the modest perpetuation of a great man's memory. Who now recalls the
+merits of the forgotten magnates of past ages? but Dickens's humble
+grave-stone is ever freshly tended, bright with geranium or violet.
+Ruskin's small tablet and bas-relief must hang in a dark, unnoticed,
+corner, and Tennyson's bust is relegated to a pillar of Poet's Corner.
+And what is left, one may ask, of our National Valhalla, for the great
+names of a future age?
+
+The solemn dignity of the Confessor's Chapel, and of Henry VIIth's
+beautiful chapel behind it, have, after the crude monuments of the
+Nave, all the calm of a secluded byway after the clamour of a noisy
+street.
+
+Westminster Abbey is full of beautiful pictures. On a sunny day,
+especially, the play of light and shade on its pillars, the fretted
+tracery of its interlaced arches, the fine harmony of its proportions,
+the golden, mellowing, subdued light that enters through its "rose"
+windows, the colour of its many tombs and rich marbles, that, on a day
+of London winter, so beautifully harmonises with the whole, may well
+tempt many an artist. To gain the full glory of the long aisles in
+their aerial perspective, the Abbey should be seen from the far end of
+the Nave. Everywhere is beauty; but perhaps one of the most lovely
+"bits" in the church is that furnished by the three canopied tombs of
+Henry III.'s family,--the tombs of Edmund Crouchback, Earl of
+Lancaster, Countess Aveline, his wife, and Aymer de Valence. These
+three tombs make a charming picture from the Sacrarium, where they
+stand; viewed, too, from the aisle just beneath them, two of them
+tower up grandly, to their full height; the third, however, that of
+Aveline, is hidden from the aisle by an ugly eighteenth-century
+monument. (Truly, the eighteenth century has much to answer for!) The
+lofty pinnacles of these tombs, the richness of their sculptured
+foliage and crockets, and the calmness of their supported effigies,
+are very impressive. Among other strikingly picturesque views is that
+of the small chapel, or rather, doorway, of St. Erasmus, dating from
+Richard II.'s time, a low arch supported by clustered pillars; and
+also that of the splendid "Chantry of Henry V.," towering at the
+entrance to Henry VIIth's Chapel, above the royal circle of tombs on
+either side. Over the Arch that canopies Henry's tomb, (an arch in the
+shape of the letter "H,") is the iron bar with the king's shield,
+saddle and helmet,--the helmet which we would fain for poetry's sake,
+think to be
+
+  --"that casque that did affright the air at Agincourt,"
+
+--but which was, probably, merely a tilting-helmet made for the
+funeral. There is a sad humanity about these blackened accoutrements
+of the dead, standing out against the golden half-light of the
+dimly-seen chapel beyond, hanging so long in their lofty position as
+to seem a part of the Abbey itself. Have they not, before now,
+appealed to the imagination of many a Westminster school-boy, sitting
+below in the choir, and set him wondering about those old Plantagenets
+and Tudors, who seem here so much more alive and human than in the
+dull pages of a history book?
+
+The best tombs of the Abbey are only free and open to inspection on
+Mondays and Tuesdays within certain hours; on all other days, they are
+locked up, and people are only "taken round" them at stated times and
+under supervision. On Mondays and Tuesdays there is, mostly, a good
+assembly of sightseers; and, whether one choses a free day, full of
+people, or whether one rather elects to be taken round on a sixpenny
+day in custody, in either case one inevitably loses much of the charm
+and feeling of the beautiful old church and its associations. On free
+days, boys have a tendency to clatter distractingly up and down the
+wooden steps that lead to the Confessor's Chapel, with other
+diversions natural to the juvenile mind; on sixpenny days, you go in
+and out with the crowd in a depressing "queue," while each chapel in
+turn is unlocked and its monuments explained in a sad monotone. No
+other arrangement, no doubt, is possible; yet, who could penetrate to
+the soul of the Abbey under such conditions as these? It is perhaps
+not unnatural that the vergers, who have performed the office so
+often, should feel a certain satiety in the process, and that they
+should wish to hurry the visitor through the chapels as quickly and
+perfunctorily as may be; and yet, how charming would it be to spend a
+long afternoon here, in study or enjoyment, undisturbed! In an
+unwashed and noisy crowd, a crowd which seems to imagine that the
+Tombs of the Kings are a species of Waxworks, who can think, or enjoy,
+or remember? Moreover, when one is, so to speak, "in custody," one
+must always be very careful to do nothing which may draw down on one's
+self the suspicion of the custodian. In this connexion one is tempted
+to recall the story told of a certain too-conscientious verger in one
+of our provincial cathedrals. A devout visitor knelt down at an
+altar-tomb; an action for which the said verger promptly reprimanded
+him. "I was only praying," murmured the visitor, rising abashed. "Oh,
+that can't be allowed," said the verger; "we can't let people pray
+about wherever they like; _that would never do_."
+
+In Westminster Abbey they are hardly so particular; and yet, something
+of this same sense of restriction the reverent visitor to the ancient
+edifice also experiences. His spirit recoils from locked entrance
+gates and tours of perfunctory inspection, and yearns for but one hour
+of the "bliss of solitude," to invoke, if not the shades of the mighty
+dead, at least something of the feeling that clings round their
+memorial chapels. It is this feeling that Froude has so well
+described: "Between us and the old English," he says in an eloquent
+passage, "there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
+historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and
+our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the
+aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures
+sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of
+what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of
+church bells, that peculiar creation of mediaeval age, which falls upon
+the ear like the echo of a vanished world."
+
+And now for the other side of the picture. I was once, on a "sixpenny
+day," in the north aisle of Henry VIIth's chapel, admiring the quaint
+cradle-tomb of that "royal rosebud" of three days old,--Princess
+Sophia,--and pondering over that strange curse of Stuarts and Tudors,
+when up came a couple, 'Arry and 'Arriet, of the usual cockney
+honey-mooning type. They were evidently "doing" the London monuments
+in style, and eschewed free days. The bride seemed tired and somewhat
+apathetic; she evidently had to be kept severely up to the mark.
+
+"Funny little nipper," said the young man peeping into the cradle:
+"It's a won'erful big child for three days old," said the bride, with
+some faint show of interest; and, "my! how silly it _is_ dressed! only
+fancy, a cap like that there for a byby!" Then they turned to Queen
+Elizabeth's effigy: "I don't like the looks of 'er," said the lady,
+with something between a shudder and a giggle: "I come over jes' now
+so faint," she continued, her pink colour fading: "it's 'ardly' 'elthy
+in 'ere with all these corpses, is it?.... Wax-works is much nicer;
+they don't give yer the creeps so. Let's go and 'ave a 'bus ride, an'
+give the old Johnny the slip. I think we've 'ad our sixpennorth." So
+they went, but alas! they had left me their desecration.
+
+Strange, indeed, are Fate's ironies! Queen Elizabeth and her cousin,
+Mary Queen of Scots, rest in the two side aisles of Henry VIIth's
+chapel in stately tombs, much resembling one another, erected, with
+praiseworthy impartiality, to his "dearest mother" and his "dear
+sister," by King James I. In the Stuart vault, close to the unhappy
+Queen of Scots, is buried Lady Arabella Stuart, "childe of woe"; that
+poor prisoner of the Tower, separated from her loved and just-wedded
+husband and kept by her cousin James I. in durance vile, till "her
+reason left her," and she died. Even in death her disgrace followed
+her, when, for fear of being thought too respectful to one "dying out
+of royal favour," the authorities dared not even provide her poor body
+with an adequate coffin! Poor "Ladie Arbell!" Of all the tragedies of
+English history, none are sadder or more cruel than hers, or reflect,
+more vividly, the inhumanity of the time.
+
+The interior of Henry VIIth's Chapel,--in its darkened glory of golden
+light, with its fretted roof, its "walls wrought into universal
+ornament," its many statues and sculptures, and contrasted dark oak
+choir stalls, with the banners of their owners, the Knights of the
+Bath, hanging overhead,--is very fine. In the centre of the chapel is
+the magnificent tomb of Henry VII., the third founder of the Abbey,
+who, with much of the feeling of the men who built the Pyramids,
+determined this as the splendid mausoleum of his race. The monument,
+enclosed by a screen, or "closure," of gilt copper, is by Torregiano.
+Here, with Henry, is buried his wife, Elizabeth of York, in marriage
+with whom the king finally united the York and Lancaster cause. Hither
+was brought in state, in 1502, the body of this last Queen of the
+House of York, dead at twenty-seven, her waxen effigy, with
+dishevelled hair and Royal robes, lying outside her coffin:
+
+     "The first stone of the splendid edifice founded by Henry
+     VII., and which was to contain all the glory of his race,
+     had only been laid a month when his wife, Elizabeth of York,
+     died. She lies in its first grave. More wrote an elegy on
+     the Queen, who died in giving birth to a child in the
+     Tower:--
+
+            "Adieu, sweetheart! my little daughter late,
+             Thou shalt, sweet babe, such is thy destiny,
+             Thy mother never know; for here I lie.
+             At Westminster, that costly work of yours,
+             Mine own dear lord, I now shall never see."
+
+In front of the chantry of his grandparents, is the altar-tomb of
+Edward VI., the boy-king of sixteen, "flower of the Tudor name"; a
+small portion of the frieze of his ancient monument, also by
+Torregiano, has survived Republican zeal, and has been let into the
+more modern structure.
+
+In one of the five small apsidal chapels at the eastern extremity of
+the Abbey is Dean Stanley's fine monument, a recumbent figure, by
+Boehm. Here, in the "farthest east" of the Abbey that they so loved
+and lived in, he and his wife, Lady Augusta, "devoted servant of her
+Queen," rest until the judgment day. The Duke of Buckingham's huge
+tomb, that almost blocks another of these small chapels, is
+picturesque: and near it, on the floor of the main building, is a blue
+slab simply inscribed with the name of "Elizabeth Claypole." Close to
+the great shrine of Henry and Elizabeth rests peacefully this
+favourite daughter of Oliver Cromwell, the only member of her family
+suffered to remain in the Abbey after the Restoration, when the
+mouldering bodies of her father and his myrmidons were exhumed and
+hanged at Tyburn, showing the furious brutality, unconquered even by
+death, of the
+
+  --"foolish people, unsounde and ever untreue."
+
+The "great Temple of Silence and Reconciliation," that had condoned so
+many even greater wrongs, has, here alone, failed to protect its dead.
+
+Henry VIIth's Chapel is now mainly used for such functions as the
+yearly convocation of the bishops, and for early bi-weekly services
+for the deanery and its precincts, &c. Its banners are decaying, its
+stalls are no longer used by the "Knights of the Bath"; and the last
+banner placed here was that of the Duke of Wellington, in 1804.
+
+As Henry VIIth's Chapel is the mausoleum of the Tudors, so is Edward
+the Confessor's Chapel that of the Plantagenets. Here the whole space,
+indeed, is "paved with kings, queens, and princes, who all wished to
+rest as near as possible to the miracle-working shrine." In the royal
+ring of tombs, the treasure, the jewels, the gilt-bronze accessories,
+and, in some cases, the arms and even the heads of the effigies have
+been raided at some past time. The beautiful effigy of Eleanor of
+Castile, wife of Edward I, that "queen of good memory" who accompanied
+her lord to the Crusades, and in honour to whom nine monumental
+crosses were erected in London, still, however, remains intact. "The
+beautiful features of the dead queen are expressed in the most serene
+quietude; her long hair waves from beneath the circlet on her brow."
+Edward I, the greatest of the Plantagenets, lies near on a bare
+altar-tomb of grey marble; a plain monument for so great and glorious
+a being. On the north side are the words: "Scotorum Malleus" (the
+Hammer of the Scots). At the head of Eleanor, his daughter-in-law,
+lies Henry III., the "second founder" of the Abbey; "quiet Henry
+III., our English Nestor," who reigned fifty-six years; his effigy is
+of gilt brass. Katherine of Valois, widow of Henry V., the ancestress
+of the Tudor line, rests under the altar of her husband's chantry; she
+it was whose mummified corpse Pepys records that he kissed in 1668,
+"reflecting upon it that I did kiss a queene." Queen Philippa of
+Hainault, her husband Edward III., and the luckless Richard II.,
+complete the royal circle.
+
+Just in front of the screen that stands at the foot of the Confessor's
+shrine, are the Coronation Chairs. The most battered and ancient of
+these is the old coronation chair of Edward I, enclosing the famous
+"Prophetic Stone" or "Stone of Destiny," of Scone; concerning which
+the Scots believed, that wherever it was carried the supreme power
+would go with it. Edward I. brought it from Scotland in 1297, in token
+of the complete subjugation of that country. Every English monarch
+since then has been crowned in this chair, and Queen Victoria used it
+at her Jubilee service. The second coronation chair, (made for Queen
+Mary II., wife of William III.), is only used when kings and queens
+are crowned together: it was used for Queen Adelaide in 1831; and
+lately for Queen Alexandra.
+
+Opposite the wooden staircase that descends from the Confessor's
+Chapel to the ambulatory below, a small doorway leads to the Islip
+Chapel; where on "free" days, the "Wax Effigies" may be seen. This
+curious and ghoul-like collection is the outcome of a custom dating
+from ancient times; the custom of carrying in funeral procession,
+first, the embalmed body open on the bier, and subsequently, the wax
+effigy, or portrait model, for the crowd to gaze at; the effigy to
+rest beside the tomb or monument. Remains of such effigies, broken,
+mutilated and often unrecognisable, are extant even as far back as
+Queen Philippa's time; these ghastly fragments are however, not on
+general view. Eleven wax figures still remain; dirty, but in a
+tolerable state of preservation; they suggest a very grimy and
+antiquated Chamber of Horrors. Presumably taken from life, or, in
+some cases, from a cast after death, they are invaluable as
+contemporary likenesses. Charles II., an unpleasantly yellow, ogling
+creature in wig and feathered hat, a ghoulish dandy with the
+well-known "drop" in his cheeks, confronts us at the top of a narrow
+wooden stair. If it be difficult to imagine his fascinations,--those
+of his neighbour, "La Belle Stuart," are a trifle more suggestive; yet
+here the lady is, surely, no longer very young; and we can hardly
+connect her with the figure of "Britannia" on our pence, for which it
+is said she consented to sit as model. Queen Anne's effigy (she died
+at fifty) is, possibly, flattering; or it may be a more youthful
+portrait. Her sad, pale face, in her gorgeous dress, suggest
+remembrances of her eighteen dead children, buried in the Stuart Vault
+of Henry VIIth's chapel, about the coffin of the Queen of Scots;
+"pressing in and around, with their accumulated weight, the
+illustrious dust below." Strange doom of the Stuart race! Were these
+people merely human and not royal, would not such afflictions win our
+sympathy? We hear of James II.'s faults--history is reticent about his
+eleven dead children; of "Good Queen Anne's" virtues,--hardly a word
+as to her maternal grief. Poor, kindly, amiable queen! as she sits
+here in her tarnished grandeur, she seems, of a truth, overpowered by
+the "load,"
+
+  --"wellnigh not to be borne,
+  Of the too great orb of her fate."
+
+Mary II., a big woman, nearly six feet in height, towers over her
+small husband, William III., who, nevertheless, stands on a footstool
+beside her. Most witch-like of all is the effigy of Queen Elizabeth,
+(a restoration of the Chapter, in 1760, of the original figure carried
+at her funeral, which had by then fallen to pieces). The portrait is
+evidently from a cast taken after death, for it suggests the wasting
+of disease, the anguish of suffering. The Queen seems haunted and
+hag-ridden; the wizened and weird appearance of the figure is in
+horrid contrast with its gay attire; the high-heeled, gold shoes with
+rosettes, stomacher covered with jewels, and huge ruff of the time. A
+strange experience, indeed, is this "Islip Chapel"; and one that
+leaves a lasting impression!
+
+The small chapels round the Confessor's shrine, separated from it by
+the Ambulatories, are filled with interesting mediaeval tombs, and some
+brasses of great beauty. In one of them is the eighteenth-century
+monument of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, by Roubiliac, so popular among
+the Abbey sightseers. This theatrical figure of the skeleton Death
+hurling a dart at the dying lady, so affrighted, says tradition, an
+intending robber, that he fled in terror, leaving his crowbar behind.
+And I can never leave the Abbey without admiring that lovely figure of
+the beggar girl holding a baby, in the North Transept, that
+commemorates, among surrounding politicians and soldiers, the
+charities of a certain Mrs. Elizabeth Warren, dead in 1816.
+
+How dazzlingly the sunlight of London gleams upon us, as we leave the
+twilight of the Abbey! We may quit it by the small door of "Poet's
+Corner," that door where poor, ill-used, foolish Queen Caroline beat
+in vain and undignified effort for admittance to and participation in
+her cruel husband's coronation; dying, one short fortnight afterwards,
+"of a broken heart." From Poet's Corner we enter upon a pleasant green
+sward, diversified by the flying buttresses that, in grand blackness
+of London smoke, support the Chapter-House; emerging, presently, into
+the strange twentieth-century bustle and din of Victoria-Street. Or,
+going out through the front entrance in the North Transept,
+("Solomon's Porch,") we come upon St. Margaret's Church, that building
+which, beautiful in itself, renders such service to the Abbey, by
+presenting it to the eye in its true proportions. The ancient
+cloisters, part of which date from the early conventual buildings
+here, (a Benedictine house connected with the foundation of the first
+minster), may be reached, either through a door from the South Aisle,
+or through the neighbouring "Dean's Yard," a pleasant square of
+old-fashioned houses, where from time immemorial the merry
+Westminster boys have played. If the visitor be of an antiquarian, or
+historical, turn of mind, he may now penetrate to the old "Chapel of
+the Pyx," a remnant of the earliest times, and the ancient
+treasure-house of England's Kings; or to the Chapter-House, an
+octagonal chamber, now restored to its pristine beauty by judicious
+restoration. If, on the contrary, he merely prefer to wander vaguely,
+every turn of the cloisters will present to him a new and charming
+picture. Especially in spring are these cloisters delightful, when the
+old trees of the courts and closes put on their early green, an
+innocent green that contrasts so poetically with the crumbling grime
+of the ancient walls. It is the eternal contrast of Life and of Death.
+In this favoured spot, the Canons' houses, the old School of
+Westminster, and the ecclesiastical precincts generally, are all
+entangled in a labyrinth of cloisters, difficult to thread, save to
+the elect. School and church buildings, cloisters, picturesque byways
+and back streets, seem all here inextricably confused; but this only
+renders the locality the more attractive. Suddenly, you come upon a
+brass door, announcing, in spotless metal, "The Deanery." It is in a
+quiet court, built up under the Abbey's very shadow; and here, facing
+you, is the famous "Jerusalem Chamber," a most picturesque building
+outside, with ancient, crumbling, (happily not "restored,") stones,
+and painted glass windows. Here, as told in Shakespeare, King Henry
+IVth died:
+
+  _King Henry_: "Doth any name particular belong
+                Unto the lodging where I first did swoon?"
+  _Warwick_:    "'Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord."
+  _King Henry_: "Laud be to God! even there my life must end;
+                It hath been prophesied to me many years
+                I should not die but in Jerusalem,
+                Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land;
+                But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie;
+                In that Jerusalem shall Harry die."
+                                   _Henry IVth_, Act IV, Sc. 4.
+
+The Deanery is a low gabled building, with a charming old-world air.
+Further on is a small enclosure called "Little Cloisters;" a tiny
+secluded court where the clergy of the Abbey live. Here is a curious
+tablet that records the death of a poor sufferer "who through ye
+spotted veil of ye smallpox rendered up his pure and unspotted soul."
+Reached from Dean's Yard by a vaulted passage and an ancient gate, is
+Little Dean's Yard, where is the classic gateway to Westminster
+School.
+
+The cloisters, like the Abbey itself, contain many monuments and
+inscriptions. One in particular, "Jane Lister, dear childe, 1688"
+charmed Dean Stanley, as recalling, in its simplicity, the early
+monuments of the catacombs.
+
+The blackened, time-honoured houses of Dean's Yard are now varied by
+some new private mansions. Part of the square is now occupied by
+"Church House," a kind of large ecclesiastical club and office. Its
+main portion, which extends far back into neighbouring streets and
+purlieus, is of cheerful red brick.
+
+The narrow streets of Westminster are curious and interesting, if
+occasionally just a trifle "slummy." They are generally old, tortuous,
+and picturesque; but the old, as in other parts of London, is
+gradually being displaced by the new. Westminster is now much sought
+after as a residential neighbourhood; building is increasing there,
+and rents are proportionately rising. The houses are often much
+shadowed and built up to, yet, here and there, charming views of the
+Abbey and its precincts almost compensate for want of light. The too
+ubiquitous "flats" and "mansions" are multiplying here as elsewhere;
+but Cowley Street has still an old world charm, and Queen Anne's Gate
+has its attractions. On the Whitehall side, the late removal of the
+obstructing Parliament Street, and the rebuilding of Government
+offices, have made great structural alterations.
+
+Just outside the Abbey is "Broad Sanctuary," a name that commemorates
+the ancient rights and powers of the Church in protecting political
+victims and offenders from the law. "The Sanctuary" in mediaeval times
+was a square Norman tower, containing two cruciform chapels. Here did
+that poor Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV., seek refuge
+twice in her chequered and mournful life; it was on her second flight
+hither, in her widowhood, with all her children, that her "young
+princes, her tender babes," were dragged away from her to be murdered
+by their uncle Richard of Gloucester.
+
+In all the structural alterations of Westminster, its old Hall, built
+first by William Rufus, has always mercifully been spared. It was
+rebuilt by Richard II., who, if only for the sake of such a monument,
+deserved of England a better fate. This Hall, which has witnessed more
+tragedies than any other London building, is principally famous to us
+as the place of trial of Charles Stuart, King of England, 1649. Here,
+with the Naseby banners hanging over his devoted head, Charles showed
+all that firmness and control that had been so conspicuously lacking
+in his life. Macaulay describes it thus:
+
+     "The great hall of William Rufus, the hall which had
+     resounded with acclamations at the inauguration of thirty
+     kings: the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of
+     Bacon and the just absolution of Somers; the hall where the
+     eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a
+     victorious party inflamed with just resentment; the hall
+     where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with
+     the placid courage which has half redeemed his fame."
+
+[Illustration: _Victoria Tower, Westminster._]
+
+On Barry's enormous Gothic Palace, the Houses of Parliament--Time,
+which does so much both for the London buildings and for the opinions
+of Londoners,--will no doubt deliver a favourable verdict. Its florid
+richness of decoration, unsuitable, say art critics, to such a vast
+building, was in imitation of Henry VIIth's miniature chapel opposite.
+Its galleries and courts, almost as labyrinthine as the Westminster
+cloisters, require a long experience to understand and unravel. That
+Sir Charles Barry has worked Westminster Hall into his newer palace,
+entitles him to our respect and gratitude. In Old Palace Yard is that
+equestrian statue of Richard Coeur-de-Lion that has won so much praise
+from the greatest of our art critics. Old Palace Yard, too, has tragic
+associations. It was here that the Gunpowder Plot conspirators
+suffered death, opposite the windows of the house through which they
+had carried the gunpowder into the cellars under the threatened House
+of Lords. Here, also, Sir Walter Raleigh was executed in 1618.
+
+Where Barry's palace now stands, stood, from Anglo Saxon days till
+Henry VIIIth's time, the ancient palace of the English Kings; and
+here, in their very palace, grew the germ of those Houses of
+Parliament that gradually came to occupy the entire area. The Star
+Chamber, the Painted Chamber, St. Stephen's Chapel, were parts of the
+old building made familiar to us by association and by history. The
+ancient palace was safe under the shadow of its abbey and sanctuary,
+till Henry VIII., who defied both abbey and sanctuary, actuated by
+Naboth-like desire of possession, moved his residence to Whitehall.
+The Whitehall palace is gone as if it had never been; but that of
+Westminster has risen again from its ashes. This sacred spot was the
+place of our national liberties; here arose the "Mother of
+Parliaments."
+
+Not long ago, I was standing on Westminster Bridge in the gathering
+twilight; the misty glory of a fine winter's day. The river edges were
+sprinkled with a thin crust of silvery frost, the dulled red sun was
+going down in splendour behind a galaxy of pink and golden clouds.
+Insensibly, as the light faded, and the mist rose, I seemed to lose
+the forms of the modern buildings, and to see, as though in a vision,
+the "Thorney Isle" of the dim past. The huge "New Palace of
+Westminster," with its towers, was for a moment blotted out.... There,
+in the dreamy haze of sunset, I saw
+
+  --"the Minster's outlined mass
+  Rise dim from the morass."
+
+--That, surely, was no longer the Terrace of the House of Commons,
+but a marshy bed of osiers and rushes! The dark shadow yonder, across
+the broad river, was it any more the grimy, disused Lambeth
+landing-stage, or had it changed to the rude primitive boats of the
+Saxon fisher-folk, "moored among the bulrush stems"? The clamour
+yonder,--was it the shouting of drunken bargees, or merely the voices
+of simple peasants, busy with their nets, singing the evening hymn?...
+And was that a barge being towed up stream, or was it not, rather, a
+boat crossing to the nearer shore, with its unknown, saintly
+passenger? Then, suddenly, a blaze of light irradiating the gloom--is
+it the miraculous glow from the consecrated Minster, or....
+
+I start, for some one touches me gently on the shoulder. I turn round,
+half expecting to see a Saxon hind in leather jerkin and thonged
+sandals.... But a modern lamplighter with tall pole pushes past me,
+and----
+
+"Please, lydy, gimme suthin' jis' to keep the life in my little byby,"
+wails the voice of the professional beggar, breaking the spell, and
+disclosing an unhappy, shawled, and croupy infant. "I ain't got a
+place ter sleep in this night. Gawd knows I ain't, dear lydy."
+
+The woman's appearance suggests the public-house, and I realise all
+the sinfulness of encouraging croupy (and possibly borrowed) babies to
+be out at unseasonable hours; nevertheless, the simpler Anglo-Saxon
+mood prevails, and the woman gets my sixpence. She departs with husky
+blessings ... and a chorus of coughs. "Ah, poor soul," I thought as I
+watched the wretched creature disappear to the shadow of some yet
+darker archway, "would not you, and such as you, have found better
+shrift in old days?--There was the convent;--there the sanctuary;
+there the gracious, unquestioning succour; there the majestic houses
+of the Father of Mankind and His special servants.... And ever at the
+sacred gates sat Mercy, pouring out relief from a never-failing store
+to the poor and the suffering; ever within the sacred aisles the
+voices of holy men were pealing heavenwards in intercession for the
+sins of mankind; and such blessed influences were thought to exhale
+around those mysterious precincts, that even the poor outcasts of
+society,--the debtor, the felon, and the outlaw--gathered round the
+walls as the sick men sought the shadow of the apostles, and lay there
+sheltered from the avenging hand, till their sins were washed from off
+their souls...."
+
+But the vision has fled--the present once more dominates.... Now the
+lights begin, in serried rows and twinkling patterns, to glow along
+the shores of the vast and deceptive Armida-palace; the "cruel lights
+of London," hiding so much that is grim, sad, and terrible.... There,
+grey against a background of rosy opal, the Houses of Parliament rise
+from the silvery river in misty grandeur.... Then, gradually the
+"nocturne" changes its key; the darkness deepens, and the Westminster
+towers begin to loom up blackly against the lurid sky.... Big Ben
+booms solemnly through the invading mist.... For how many centuries, I
+wondered, has the evening bell resounded over the marshes of Thorney?
+Only in the lapse of time it has somewhat changed its note.... Convent
+bell,--church bell,--secular bell! It calls now no longer to prayer
+and devotion, but to business, or, maybe, pleasure ... as the blaze of
+light that now shines from its tower flashes forth the might of the
+Temporal power, not the miraculous workings of the Eternal.... Yet,
+"the Lord God of Israel, he slumbers not, nor sleeps." ... How loudly
+the strokes peal!... One ... two ... three ... four....
+
+"Move on, please," sounds the voice of the burly policeman, evidently
+suspecting my motives, and accrediting me with suicidal intentions.
+"Can't stay 'ere all night, y'know."
+
+So I "move on"; and Night, and the river-mist, between them envelop,
+as with a pall, the enormous city.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA
+
+     "In old days ... the hawthorn spread across the fields and
+     market gardens that lay between Kensington and the river.
+     Lanes ran to Chelsea, to Fulham, to North End, where
+     Richardson once lived and wrote in his garden-house. The
+     mist of the great city hid the horizon and dulled the sound
+     of the advancing multitude; but close at hand ... were
+     country corners untouched--blossoms instead of bricks in
+     spring-time, summer shade in summer."--_Miss Thackeray, Old
+     Kensington._
+
+     "There is not a step of the way, from ... Kensington Gore to
+     ... Holland House, in which you are not greeted with the
+     face of some pleasant memory. Here, to 'mind's eyes' ...
+     stands a beauty, looking out of a window; there, a wit,
+     talking with other wits at a garden gate; there, a poet on
+     the green sward, glad to get out of the London smoke and
+     find himself among trees. Here come De Veres of the times of
+     old; Hollands and Davenants, of the Stuart and Cromwell
+     times; Evelyn peering about him soberly, and Samuel Pepys in
+     a bustle.... Here, in his carriage, is King William the
+     Third, going from the Palace to open Parliament ... and
+     there, from out of Kensington Gardens, comes bursting, as if
+     the whole recorded polite world were in flower at one and
+     the same period, all the fashion of the gayest times of
+     those sovereigns, blooming with chintzes, full-blown with
+     hoop-petticoats, towering topknots and toupees.... Who is to
+     know of all this company, and not be willing to meet
+     it?"--_Leigh Hunt._
+
+     "Faith, and it's the old Court suburb that you spoke of, is
+     it? Sure, an' it's a mighty fine place for the
+     quality."--_Old Play._
+
+
+[Illustration: _Anglers in the Parks._]
+
+The great highway of Knightsbridge,--on the southern side of the
+Park,--leads, as everybody knows, from Hyde Park Corner to Kensington.
+Kensington, as it is now, is an all-embracing name, a generic term;
+it comprises not only Old Kensington, but both "West Kensington," a
+new and quickly increasing district of tall flats and "Queen Anne"
+houses, as far removed from London proper, for all practical purposes,
+as St. Albans; and "South Kensington," a dull and uninteresting
+quarter, but close to all the big West-end museums and collections,
+and where no self-respecting lady or gentleman of the professional or
+"middle classes" can really help living. He, or she, must,
+nevertheless, beware lest they stray too far from the sacred
+precincts. For, on the west, South Kensington degenerates into Earl's
+Court; on the south, a belt of "mean streets" divides it from equally
+select Chelsea (and, in London, the difference of but one street may
+divide the green enclosure of the elect from the dusty Sahara of the
+vulgar); while on the east, its glories fade into the dull, unlovely
+streets of Pimlico, brighten into the red-brick of the Cadogan
+Estate, or solidify into the gloomy pomp of Belgravia.
+
+These, however, are but Kensington's later excrescences, due to the
+enormous increase of London's population, and to the consequent
+building craze of the last century. It was the Great Exhibition of
+1851 that gave building, in this direction, its great impetus. The
+original village of Kensington, the "Old Court Suburb" of Leigh Hunt's
+anecdotes, lies in and about the Kensington High Street, the Gardens,
+and the Palace. It is pre-eminently of eighteenth century renown;
+Pepys hardly mentions it; its glory was after his day. It is reached
+from London by the Knightsbridge Road, a thoroughfare that, crowded as
+it is to-day by the world of fashion, was, only at the end of the
+eighteenth century, so lonely as to be unsafe from the ravages of
+thieves and footpads; a road "along which," Mr. Hare remarks
+plaintively, "London has been moving out of town for the last twenty
+years, but has never succeeded in getting into the country." So
+solitary, indeed, was this road that, even at the close of the
+eighteenth century, a bell used to be rung on Sunday evenings to
+summon the people returning to London from Kensington Village, and to
+allow them to set out together under mutual protection. London is not,
+even now, well lit as compared with large foreign cities; in old days,
+however, the darkness was such as to draw down the well-deserved
+strictures of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Such was the insecurity of
+that courtly highway, the Kensington or Knightsbridge Road, that it
+was the first place to adopt, in 1694, oil lamps with glazed lights,
+in preference to the older fashion of lanterns and wicks of cotton.
+
+Some of London's finest mansions are now to be found in this
+Knightsbridge Road. On the left, as you go towards Kensington, are
+Kent House (Louisa, Lady Ashburton), once lived in by the Duke of
+Kent, Queen Victoria's father; Stratheden House, and Alford
+House,--this last a fine modern building of brick and terra-cotta,
+with high roofs. Beyond Kensington Gore (so called from "Old Gore
+House," that once occupied the site of the Albert Hall), is the
+attractive and strangely rural-looking Lowther Lodge, now so cruelly
+dominated by tall "mansions"; and further still, the vast "Albert
+Hall," a red Colosseum of music. This, in spring, is a delightful
+drive; indeed, London wears here such a semi-suburban air that it is
+with almost the feeling of entering a new townlet that we presently
+approach the charming "High Street" of Old Kensington. Charming it is
+still, with still something of an old-world air; and yet, during the
+last fifty years or so, it has terribly altered. In the old days, the
+days when "the shabby tide of progress" had not yet spread to this
+quiet old suburb of which Miss Thackeray wrote so lovingly;--had not
+yet engulfed "one relic after another, carrying off many and many a
+landmark and memory,"--there were "gardens, and trees, and great walls
+along the high road that came from London, passing through the old
+white turnpike.... In those days the lanes spread to Fulham, white
+with blossom in spring, or golden with the yellow London sunsets that
+blazed beyond the cabbage-fields.... There were high brown walls along
+Kensington Gardens, reaching to the Palace Gate: elms spread their
+shade and birds chirruped, and children played behind them."
+
+Yet, even for sweet Dolly Vanborough, Miss Thackeray confesses, Old
+Kensington was already vanishing. Already for her "the hawthorn bleeds
+as it is laid low and is transformed year after year into iron
+railings and areas, for particulars of which you are requested to
+apply to the railway company, and to Mr. Taylor, the house-agent." How
+much, alas, is left of it now? True, Holland House, and Kensington
+Palace, and Gardens, are left inviolate, but Campden Hill is adorned
+by the aspiring chimneys of waterworks, the peace of quiet Kensington
+Square is invaded by model lodging-houses, the underground railway
+defiles the pleasant High Street, and where of old the hawthorn
+bloomed, tall placards now advertise "Very Desirable Mansions to be
+Let on Exceptional Terms."
+
+[Illustration: _Kensington Palace and the Round Pond._]
+
+But Kensington has not changed in essentials. In those old days it was
+already, as it is now, a great Roman Catholic quarter, with convents
+and shops for the sale of sacred objects. No great cathedral had as
+yet been built there; no Newman as yet looked steadfastly from his
+marble alcove over the noisy Brompton Road; the tendencies in that
+direction were, however, already paramount.
+
+When a London suburb has once become crowded with houses, what was
+once picturesque becomes speedily squalid and sordid; the pretty
+village street soon changes to a murky alley, and the ivy-grown tavern
+converts itself into a mere disreputable-looking public-house. Of this
+sad fact, Miss Thackeray's pleasant lanes, running from Kensington to
+Chelsea and Fulham, furnish at the present day abundant proof. The
+charming village lanes that at the beginning of last century filled
+Kensington and Chelsea,--the dairies such as that where pretty Emma
+Penfold dispensed curds and whey,--the cottages with damask
+rose-trees,--the tea-gardens, rural as now those on Kew Green,--what
+is now their latter end? Their modern realisations--Sydney Street,
+Smith Street, Manor Street--are not exactly attractive or savoury
+byways. No, it requires palaces and big mansions to keep up the
+"rus-in-urbe"; mere cottages cannot do it without degenerating into
+drying-grounds, unspeakable back yards, or slums. But, if the old
+beauty has gone from Kensington, another beauty, of a different kind,
+awaits it. Of such beauty the imposing dome of the "Brompton Oratory,"
+seen against a lurid sunset at the end of a vista in the Brompton
+Road, is an effective instance. This church, so dramatically placed in
+close proximity with the Anglican parish church, is a very striking
+object in the landscape; especially striking, too, when the light
+"that London takes the day to be," has softened and blended its more
+salient architectural features into one dimly glorified mass.
+
+If Kensington is somewhat addicted to "cliques" and to social
+exclusiveness, it is, after all, only following out its ancient
+traditions. For in older days it was always prim and conservative,
+governed by its own laws.
+
+     "There was" (says Miss Thackeray) "a Kensington world ...
+     somewhat apart from the big uneasy world surging beyond the
+     turnpike--a world of neighbours bound together by the old
+     winding streets and narrow corners in a community of
+     venerable elm trees and traditions that are almost levelled
+     away. Mr. Awl, the bootmaker in High Street, exhibited
+     peculiar walking-shoes long after high heels and kid
+     brodekins had come into fashion in the metropolis. The last
+     time I was in his shop I saw a pair of the old-fashioned,
+     flat, sandalled shoes, directed to Miss Vieuxtemps, in
+     Palace Green. Tippets, poke-bonnets, even a sedan chair,
+     still existed among us long after they had been discarded by
+     more active minds."
+
+It all suggests nothing so much as one of Mr. G. D. Leslie's pictures.
+The poetic fancy of the writer of _Old Kensington_ is, indeed,
+conceived in much the same pleasant minor key as the artist's--the
+author of _School Revisited_ and kindred idylls,--both evoking visions
+of girls in short waists, lank, frilled skirts, and sandals, amid cool
+suburban walled gardens, grass plots, and fountains.
+
+Thackeray lived at three Kensington houses:--first, at that known as
+"The Cottage":--No. 13 (now No. 16), Young Street,--from 1847 to 1853;
+secondly, at No. 36, Onslow Square, from 1853 to 1862; and thirdly, at
+No. 2, Palace Green, where he died. The great writer's daughters, who
+must have been quite little children when he first came here, no doubt
+knew and loved well their home of so many years. From the daughter's
+very vivid reminiscences, we get charming sketches of the life and the
+different abodes of the family. _The Newcomes_, _The Virginians_, and
+the _Four Georges_ were written in Onslow Square, where, says Miss
+Thackeray, "I used to look up from the avenue of old trees and see my
+father's head bending over his work in the study window, which was
+over the drawing-room." But Onslow Square is close to South Kensington
+Station, and the Young Street house, which was the earlier residence,
+was certainly in a prettier neighbourhood. Also, it has
+double-fronted bay windows, and enjoyed, moreover, the honour of
+inspiring its tenant's _magnum opus_, for here Thackeray wrote _Vanity
+Fair_, as well as _Esmond_ and _Pendennis_. Most of his work was done
+in a second-story room, overlooking an open space of orchards and
+gardens. A tablet now distinguishes the window where the novelist
+worked, with the initials W. M. T. grouped in a monogram between the
+dates of his residence here; the names of the three books of this
+period being inscribed in the border.
+
+Artists, who in the early part of last century were still more or less
+faithful to the northern suburbs, have, during the last three or four
+decades flocked to Kensington and Chelsea. Millais, Leighton, and
+others led the way; and now fine studios abound in all the newer and
+airy streets of red brick houses. At No. 6, The Terrace, Campden Hill,
+poor John Leech, who moved hither from Bloomsbury street afflictions,
+died in 1864 from spasm of the heart, at the comparatively early age
+of forty-seven. On Campden Hill, also, is "Holly Lodge," Lord
+Macaulay's residence; the place, too, where he died, and where he
+"loved to entertain all his youthful nephews and nieces." Campden Hill
+has still a certain charm, a charm of gardens, terraces, and irregular
+houses; it has, too, so many winding ways, that it is easier to lose
+one's bearings here, than almost anywhere in London.
+
+Leigh Hunt, the gossiping chronicler of Kensington Court scandals and
+celebrities, lived for eleven years, and more successfully than
+elsewhere, in Edwardes Square, a charming enclosure, a little way back
+from the Kensington Road beyond High Street, and opposite the grounds
+of Holland House. Here the versatile writer, the ill starred
+"Skimpole" of Dickens's satire, lived with his numerous family,--now
+older than in the Cheyne Row period of their existence,--and,
+possibly, less addicted to litter, and to borrowing the long-suffering
+neighbours' tea-cups. Leigh Hunt's son, Thornton Hunt, thus describes
+the Square at this time:--
+
+     "Our square, with its pretty houses and rustic enclosure,
+     left with its natural undulations, very slight, but
+     sufficient to diminish the formal look, its ivy-covered
+     backs of houses on one side, and gardens and backs of houses
+     on the other, was a curiosity which, when I first saw it, I
+     could not account for on English principles, uniting as it
+     did something decent, pleasant, and cheap, with such
+     anti-_comme il faut_ anomalies--such aristocratic size and
+     verdure in the ground plot, with so plebeian a smallness in
+     the tenements. But it seems a Frenchman invented it."
+
+Edwardes Square is, like Kensington Square, still pretty and rural and
+attractive. At one end of it, and looking on to the Kensington Road,
+is Earl's Terrace, a row of attractive, old-fashioned houses, set back
+from the street, with little front gardens. Here, not so very long
+ago, lived Walter Pater, continuing the literary associations of the
+neighbourhood; a lover of beauty, he, too, but very different from
+Leigh Hunt. In Hunt's time, Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald lived "as a
+boarder" at No. 4 in this terrace. Her chief claim to fame is _The
+Simple Story_, a work which few people now read, though many have
+heard of it. She appears to have been a charming and eccentric as well
+as a talented lady. Here is a diary jotting of hers, quoted by Leigh
+Hunt:--"On the 29th of June (Sunday) dined, drank tea, and supped with
+Mrs. Whitfield. At dark, she and I and her son William walked out, and
+I rapped at doors in New Street and King Street and ran away." "This
+was in the year 1788," says Hunt, "when she was five-and-thirty. But
+such people never grow old.... Divine Elizabeth Inchbald, qualified to
+be the companion of every moment of human life, grave or gay, from a
+rap at the street door in a fit of mirth to the deepest phases of
+sympathy."
+
+Yes, _The Simple Story_ must have been a real work of genius, for no
+one, surely, but a genius, could afford so absolutely to disregard
+_les convenances_. Though, for that matter, our feminine geniuses of
+to-day take themselves a trifle more seriously. Imagine, for instance,
+our George Eliots of the twentieth century, our presidents of writers'
+unions and clubs, going out late at night to ring people's doorbells
+and run away! Such "eternal childishness" really out-Skimpoles
+Skimpole. If Providence had seen fit to place the two in contemporary
+residence in Edwardes Square, would not Mrs. Inchbald have been a
+neighbour after Leigh Hunt's own heart? The lady, it is further
+recorded, died--at sixty-eight, too--of "tight-lacing."
+
+Leigh Hunt's must have been an interesting personality, and Dickens's
+caricature of him, intended or no, seems cruel. The late Mr. George
+Smith, of the great publishing house, tells an entertaining story of
+him. On one occasion, it appears, Mr. Smith paid Leigh Hunt L200 in
+bank notes:
+
+     "Two days afterwards" (wrote Mr. Smith) "Leigh Hunt came in
+     a state of great agitation to tell me that his wife had
+     burned them. He had thrown the envelope with the banknotes
+     carelessly down, and his wife had flung it into the fire.
+     Leigh Hunt's agitation while on his way to bring this news
+     had not prevented him from purchasing on the road a little
+     statuette of Psyche, which he carried, without any paper
+     round it, in his hand. I told him I thought something might
+     be done in the matter. I sent to the bankers and got the
+     numbers of the notes, and then, in company with Leigh Hunt,
+     went off to the Bank of England. I explained our business,
+     and we were shown into a room where three old gentlemen were
+     sitting at tables. They kept us waiting some time, and Leigh
+     Hunt, who had meantime been staring all round the room, at
+     last got up, walked up to one of the staid officials, and
+     addressing him, said, in wondering tones: 'And this is the
+     Bank of England! And do you sit here all day, and never see
+     the green woods and the trees and flowers and the charming
+     country?' Then, in tones of remonstrance, he demanded: 'Are
+     you contented with such a life?' All this time he was
+     holding the little naked Psyche in one hand, and with his
+     long hair and flashing eyes made a surprising figure. I
+     fancy I can still see the astonished faces of the three
+     officials; they would have made a most delightful picture. I
+     said: 'Come away, Mr. Hunt, these gentlemen are very busy.'
+     I succeeded in carrying Leigh Hunt off, and, after entering
+     into certain formalities, we were told that the value of the
+     notes would be paid in twelve months. I gave Leigh Hunt the
+     money at once, and he went away rejoicing."
+
+Opposite the Palace Gardens, where "Kensington Court" now stands,
+stood once Kensington House, a big Roman Catholic boarding-house,
+surely a kind of early prototype of the modern "mansions." Here
+Louise de la Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, lived, and here Mrs.
+Inchbald died; later it was occupied by Jesuits, who have had for long
+a special stronghold in this quarter. Then, at last, in 1876, the
+older house made way for Mr. Albert Grant's pretentious Italian
+mansion of the same name, which cost L270,000, and only existed seven
+years, having been pulled down in 1883. So involved, and so difficult
+to decipher, is the history of London buildings.
+
+"Church House," so vividly described by Miss Thackeray as Dolly
+Vanborough's home, stood close to the modern Church Street. And close
+to Church Street is Campden House, a modern restoration of the ancient
+building of that name, which was burned down in 1862; the gateway of
+the old mansion being now built up into the east wall of the garden.
+Old Campden House dated from 1612, and was principally known as having
+been the residence of Queen Anne's charming and precocious little son,
+the Duke of Gloucester, the poor child who died at eleven, "from
+excessive dancing on his birthday," the last hope of the race dying
+out with him. Campden House had been taken for the boy, so that he
+might be near his aunt, Queen Mary, who was very fond of him, and had
+him carried daily in infancy to see her at Kensington Palace.
+
+Kensington Square, with its comfortable-looking houses of sober red
+brick, and windows with white painted casements, has a delightfully
+old-world aspect. Behind the houses are pleasant gardens, as yet--but
+for how long?--left untouched by the tide of progress. Thackeray, as
+well as his daughter, must have known and loved this square well; for
+here he imagined Lady Castlewood, Beatrix, and Harry Esmond to dwell.
+
+[Illustration: _Earl's Court._]
+
+Earl's Court,--now mainly remarkable for the near neighbourhood of
+"Olympia,"--the "Great Wheel,"--and an endless colony of railway
+lines,--was, some fifty years ago, still "a quaint old row of houses,
+their lattices stuffed with spring flowers, facing a deep cool pond by
+the roadside," and embowered in orchards. Spots of welcome greenery
+there still are in the wide area of West and South Kensington; there
+is a big cemetery to be buried in, and the oval enclosure called "the
+Boltons" is a pleasant place to live in. But, on the whole, the
+purlieus of Kensington are depressing. While West Kensington is
+mainly degraded "Queen Anne," interspersed with railways,--South
+Kensington has one very general distinguishing mark. It is nearly
+always stuccoed, and usually also porticoed. Its larger streets, in
+sun or shine, bear a gloomy likeness to an array of family vaults,
+awaiting their occupants. The early nineteenth century had, in truth,
+much to answer for in the way of bricks, mortar, and stucco,--but
+principally stucco! Occasionally there is some faint relief to the
+prevailing mode, and here and there some of the smaller roads are
+brightened in spring by a few acacias and hawthorns; but in the larger
+streets there is usually the same saddening uniformity, and, when once
+you have left the vicinity of Kensington Square, you find nothing in
+quite the same style until you reach Chelsea and Cheyne Walk.
+
+Chelsea, too, was a very picturesque village in old days,--when the
+"Old Chelsea Bun-House" was a favourite resort of the Court,--when
+"Ranelagh" and "Vauxhall" flourished in the neighbourhood,--and when
+the then fashionable race of London's "jolly young watermen" for their
+annual badge attracted, as the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race does
+nowadays, crowds of spectators.
+
+Ranelagh and Vauxhall! what recollections do they not suggest of
+Fielding, of Richardson, of Fanny Burney! Both these places of
+amusement flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century;
+Vauxhall (earlier called "Spring Garden"), was, so to speak, the
+"Earl's Court," the summer resort of the day; just as "Ranelagh," with
+its famous "Rotunda," was the "Olympia," or winter one. Only, both the
+ancient pleasure resorts rejoiced in being the centre of fashion,
+which can hardly be said with truth of the modern ones. Also, from old
+novelists the reader gathers that it was very dangerous for young
+ladies to go unprotected to either place, in case of being run away
+with by bold, bad young men of the "Lovelace" type. Charming young
+ladies are, perhaps, more of "a drug in the market" now: and they are
+besides, as a rule, perfectly well able to take care of themselves.
+
+That managers of those days were not more ignorant than their
+twentieth-century successors of the great art of advertising,--the
+following extract (from Rogers's _Table Talk_) shows:
+
+     "The proprietors of Ranelagh and Vauxhall used to send
+     decoy-ducks among the ladies and gentlemen who were walking
+     in the Mall, that is, persons attired in the height of
+     fashion, who every now and then would exclaim in a very
+     audible tone, 'What charming weather for Ranelagh,' or 'for
+     Vauxhall!'"
+
+At any rate, old Vauxhall Gardens must have been a charming place for
+flirtation, for "the windings and turnings in little wildernesses
+(were) so intricate, that the most experienced mothers often lost
+themselves in looking for their daughters." Part of the site of old
+Ranelagh is now appropriated as the gardens of Chelsea Hospital; the
+site of Vauxhall (in South Lambeth, on the Surrey side) is now covered
+by St. Peter's, Vauxhall, and its adjacent streets.
+
+Picturesque in old days, Chelsea is a picturesque place still, and
+much beloved of painters, poets, and _litterateurs_;--the class of
+Bloomsbury, and yet with a vast difference. Here it is the "mode" to
+be select and exclusive. The artistic "cliques" of Tite Street and
+Cheyne Walk are nothing if not particular. To use the words of the
+modest prospectus issued by a recent magazine, they "will not tolerate
+mediocrity." But then no one in Chelsea ever is, or at least allows
+himself, to be "mediocre." Perhaps the fortunate inhabitants feel, as
+do the denizens of the academic towns of Oxford and Cambridge, the
+important weight of the traditions of their literary past. The spirit
+of Carlyle, Leigh Hunt, Rossetti, George Eliot, yet gives to Chelsea a
+literary atmosphere that it must at all hazards keep up. A
+dinner-party in its august cliques is not to be lightly undertaken;
+you feel, as you enter, that this is indeed a holy place.
+
+Yet, already, the seclusion and selectness of Chelsea's sacred circles
+are being threatened with invasion by the Philistine. On "the other
+side of the water,"--where a picturesque suspension-bridge, the
+Albert Bridge, throws its graceful chain-curves across Chelsea
+Reach,--lies Battersea Park, surrounded on three sides by myriad
+red-brick flats of varying cheapness, grown like mushrooms, and still
+growing. Here is an infant community, a sort of "townier" Bedford
+Park, whose inhabitants can boast, with some truth, that they are
+"near the hum of the great city, and yet not of it." Flats are
+increasing all over London and its immediate suburbs now to such an
+extent that they are, indeed, in some danger of being overdone. In
+Central London, the growth of flats is, perhaps, of little
+consequence; but in suburban or semi-suburban London, the ubiquitous
+builder is the great bloodsucker of our day; he wanders perpetually,
+seeking, like the devil, what he may devour; and, on his debatable
+"Tom Tiddler's Ground," everlastingly "picking up gold and silver."
+But the builder has done good work too in Chelsea; for does not Cheyne
+Walk, of picturesque and venerable aspect, with its well-restored,
+red-brick, white-casemented houses, and fine old ironwork, lend a
+dignity to the western end of the Chelsea Embankment, to which, lower
+down, the spacious new red mansions, of ornate yet good style, do no
+disgrace? And modest Cheyne Row, containing the most famous dwelling
+in all Chelsea, is built in quiet, unobjectionable style.
+
+Carlyle's quiet-looking residence in Cheyne Row is, practically, a
+museum of the Soane kind, left exactly as when lived in; the only
+difference being that here the relics are purely personal. This, a
+real "house of pilgrimage" to the literary world, is, especially, the
+resort of cultured Americans, who have even, it is said, had to be
+mildly dissuaded from sitting on the Sage's chairs and trying on his
+head-gear.
+
+The "Carlyle House,"--desecrated, indeed, to the scandal of the
+neighbours, for an interregnum of unholy years by a horde of lawless
+cats,--is now entirely restored to its pristine neatness and order. It
+is difficult to imagine any place less museum-like and more pleasantly
+homely than this silent, peaceful, darkly-panelled abode, which
+seems,--backed by its green garden-close,--to be indeed a survival of
+the past, breathing forth still the spirit of the departed seer.
+
+It was thus that Carlyle wrote of the street and the house some
+seventy years ago:
+
+     "The street is flag-pathed, sunk-storied, iron-railed, all
+     old-fashioned and tightly done up; looks out on a rank of
+     sturdy old _pollarded_ (that is, beheaded) lime trees
+     standing there like giants in _tawtie_ wigs (for the new
+     boughs are still young); beyond this a high brick wall;
+     backwards a garden, the size of our back one at Comely Bank,
+     with trees, &c., in bad culture; beyond this, green
+     hayfields and tree avenues, once a bishop's pleasure
+     grounds, an unpicturesque yet rather cheerful outlook. The
+     house itself is eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very
+     ceiling, and has been all new painted and repaired; broadish
+     stair with massive balustrade (in the old style), corniced
+     and as thick as one's thigh; floors thick as a rock, wood of
+     them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanliness,
+     and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor....
+     Chelsea is a singular heterogeneous kind of spot, very dirty
+     and contused in some places, quite beautiful in others,
+     abounding in antiquities and the traces of great men--Sir
+     Thomas More, Steele, Smollett, &c. Our Row, which for the
+     last three doors or so is a street, and none of the noblest,
+     runs out upon a 'Parade' (perhaps they call it), running
+     along the shore of the river, a broad highway with huge
+     shady trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of shipping and
+     tan."
+
+Houses where people have lived, and suffered, and experienced,
+always--at least to those who know--seem to bear the impress of their
+past owners' personality. Who has not gone back, after long years, to
+an old dwelling-place, and been haunted by ghosts of the past, lurking
+in every well-known corner and cranny? There is something of the
+feeling of standing by a new-made grave,--the grave of what has been,
+and will never be again. Such feelings, in a minor degree, does the
+Carlyle house suggest to those who have read and interested themselves
+in the long-drawn-out tragedy of those joint lives with which it was
+bound up. In Mrs. Carlyle's pretty "china closet," for instance, you
+can almost see the slender figure in neat black silk, deftly arranging
+and dusting; here, in the drawing-room beyond, is her work-table; you
+can imagine her, most thrifty of housewives, mending a hole in the
+carpet; there in the chimney-corner she lay on her sofa, silently
+suffering, while her prophet vociferated his thunders, and puffed
+clouds of tobacco-smoke into the chimney. Upstairs, on the top story,
+is the much-written-of "sound-proof" room, which was really not
+"sound-proof" at all, though it was constructed with that object by
+Carlyle at a considerable expense. Possibly, "the young lady next
+door" still plays on her piano; most likely the neighbours' fowls
+still crow loudly in the mornings (for these minor evils of London are
+perennial), in full security now and immunity.
+
+A seated statue of Carlyle, by Boehm,--a real work of art,--faces the
+river in the neighbouring Embankment Gardens, close to the Albert
+Bridge. Weary, wrinkled, as Tithonus, the old man gazes ever towards
+the unceasing tides of the river and of humanity, his look troubled,
+but yet
+
+  "majestic in his sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind."
+
+In Upper (or "Little") Cheyne Row, close by the Carlyles, lived for
+seven years,--the most embarrassed years in his chequered
+career,--Leigh Hunt. (This was from 1833 to 1840, before the Edwardes
+Square time.) Could one imagine a greater contrast than these two
+Cheyne Row households? The Hunts were Bohemians of irrepressible type.
+Mrs. Carlyle, being, too, in 1834 only at the very beginning of her
+neat Chelsea housekeeping, and not yet "bug-bitten, bedusted, and
+bedevilled," was, naturally, very severe on the subject of the Hunts.
+To judge from the letters of "that clever lady, a little too much
+given to insecticide" (as Lord Bowen called her), she had but the
+poorest opinion of her neighbour's wife's "management" and borrowing
+ways. And here is Carlyle's account of the Hunt _menage_:
+
+     "Hunt's house" (he says) "excels all you have ever read
+     of--a poetical Tinkerdom, without parallel even in
+     literature. In his family room, where are a sickly large
+     wife and a whole school of well-conditioned wild children,
+     you will find half-a-dozen old rickety chairs gathered from
+     half-a-dozen different hucksters, and all seeming engaged,
+     and just pausing, in a violent hornpipe. On these and around
+     them, and over the dusty table and ragged carpet lie all
+     kinds of litter--books, papers, egg-shells, scissors, and,
+     last night when I was there, the torn heart of a
+     half-quartern loaf. His own room above stairs, into which
+     alone I strive to enter, he keeps cleaner. It has only two
+     chairs, a bookcase, and a writing-table; yet the noble Hunt
+     receives you in his Tinkerdom in the spirit of a king,
+     apologises for nothing, places you in the best seat, takes a
+     window-sill himself if there is no other, and then, folding
+     closer his loose-flowing 'muslin-cloud' of a printed
+     nightgown, in which he always writes, commences the
+     liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the prospects of man
+     (who is to be beyond measure happy yet); which again he will
+     courteously terminate the moment you are bound to go; a most
+     interesting, pitiable, lovable man, to be used kindly, but
+     with discretion."
+
+In the neighbouring Cheyne Walk have, of course, lived many notable
+people. Innumerable associations cling to this picturesque row of
+time-darkened red-brick and white-casemented houses, with the graceful
+wrought-iron railings and tall gates that shut out their trim
+front-garden plots from the curious Embankment. At No. 4, died George
+Eliot the novelist, in 1880, a short time after her marriage to Mr.
+Cross. She had only recently settled into this charming London
+dwelling, and her voluminous library had only just been arranged for
+her with infinite care, "as nearly as possible in the same order as at
+the Priory," when the sudden stroke of Death fell. Daniel Maclise, the
+early-Victorian painter, a meteor of art, and the wonder of his own
+age, had lived in this same house before. Cecil Lawson, that young
+painter of such great promise, who died so early, lived at No. 15; and
+No. 16, or "Queen's House," is bound up with the memory of that
+brilliant and wayward genius, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived here
+after his wife's tragic death, and gathered round him his famous
+miscellany of strange beasts and curious creatures.
+
+"Queen's House," unaltered in essentials, has still a picturesque and
+old-world air that agrees well with its long history. Its mellowed
+bricks of sober red have a pleasant solidity. It used to be called
+"Tudor House," owing to its early traditional associations with Queens
+Katherine Parr and Elizabeth; for the ancient "Manor House" of
+Chelsea, built by Henry VIII., occupied, with its gardens, the site of
+this and the adjoining houses; from No. 18 Cheyne Walk eastward as far
+as Oakley street. Of the many celebrated people who have lived there,
+Sir Hans Sloane was the latest;--the old house was pulled down after
+his death. The basements and gardens of the houses in Cheyne Walk
+still show traces of this palace of Henry VIII. The present "Queen's
+House" is said to have been built by Wren, the Royal Architect, for
+the neglected Queen Catherine of Braganza; and some say that the
+initials, "C. R.", in twisted iron on the gate and railings,
+commemorate her tenancy. However that may be, we may take it that
+Thackeray, in _Esmond_, describes it as the home of the old "Dowager
+of Chelsey;" and here, again, we note the curious fact that the
+fictional interest is at least as strong as the real.
+
+Inside, the house is delightful; all the rooms and passages are
+heavily wainscoted, and the balustrade of the spiral staircase is of
+"finest hand-wrought iron." When Rossetti entered on its occupation,
+Chelsea was still, though literary, comparatively unfashionable; (for
+in those days the two persuasions did not as yet go hand-in-hand). The
+poet-painter began a joint tenancy here with Swinburne, George
+Meredith, and his brother, William Rossetti; of these Swinburne was
+the most constant, and he wrote many of his best-known poems here. But
+of Mr. Meredith's would-be-tenancy the following story is told, on the
+novelist's own authority:--
+
+     "Mr. Meredith had, rather irresponsibly, agreed to occupy a
+     couple of rooms in Queen's House.... One morning therefore,
+     shortly after Rossetti moved in,--Mr. Meredith, who was
+     living in Mayfair, drove over to Chelsea to inspect his new
+     apartments. 'It was,' says the unhappy co-tenant, 'past
+     noon. Rossetti had not yet risen, though it was an exquisite
+     day. On the breakfast table, on a huge dish, rested five
+     thick slabs of bacon, upon which five rigid eggs had slowly
+     bled to death! Presently Rossetti appeared in his
+     dressing-gown with slippers down at heel, and devoured the
+     dainty repast like an ogre.' This decided Mr. Meredith. He
+     did not even trouble to look at his rooms, but sent in a
+     quarter's rent that afternoon, and remained in Mayfair,
+     where eggs and bacon were, presumably, more appetizingly
+     served."
+
+Rossetti's studio was at the back of the old house; but what the
+painter enjoyed most was the garden, an acre in extent in his time,
+with an avenue of limes opening out on to a broad grass plot;--part,
+no doubt, of the ancient "Manor House" garden:
+
+     "In this garden were kept" (says Mr. Marillier) "most of the
+     animals for which Rossetti had such a curious and
+     indiscriminate affection. How many of them there may have
+     been at any one time does not seem to be stated; but as one
+     died or disappeared, another would be got to replace it, or
+     Rossetti would see some particularly outlandish specimen at
+     Jamrach's and bear it home in triumph to add to the
+     collection. Wire cages were erected for their accommodation,
+     but these were not always proof against escape, especially
+     in the case of the burrowing animals, which had an annoying
+     way of appearing in the neighbours' gardens. Mr. W. M.
+     Rossetti has given from memory a tolerably long list of
+     creatures which at one time or another figured in the
+     menagerie at Cheyne Walk. They included a Pomeranian puppy,
+     an Irish deerhound, a barn-owl named Jessie, another owl
+     named Bobby, rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs, two successive
+     wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, an ordinary marmot,
+     kangaroos and wallabies, a deer, two or more armadillos, a
+     white mouse with her brood, a raccoon, squirrels, a mole,
+     peacocks, wood-owls, Virginian owls, horned owls, a jackdaw,
+     a raven, parakeets, a talking parrot, chameleons, grey
+     lizards, Japanese salamanders, and a laughing jackass.
+     Besides these there was a certain famous bull, a zebu, which
+     cost Rossetti L20 (he borrowed it from his brother), and
+     which manifested such animosity in confinement that it had
+     to be disposed of at once. The strident voices of the
+     peacocks were so little appreciated in the neighbourhood
+     that Lord Cadogan caused a paragraph to be inserted in all
+     his leases thereafter forbidding these birds to be kept."
+
+The house, as I said, is very little changed,--though Mr. Haweis, its
+recent occupant, added a statue of Mercury, poised on the ball at its
+gable apex,--and its brickwork is said by Mr. Marillier to have "had
+an older, more natural look in Rossetti's day." And "in front the
+unembanked river, and ... the boating bustle and longshore litter of
+the old days added picturesqueness to the view, which in all
+essentials was the same as the aged Turner had looked out upon from
+his little house not very far away." Ghosts,--of Katherine Parr and
+others,--have, not unnaturally, been accredited to "Queen's House."
+But they do not appear to have survived Rossetti's tenancy; for Mr.
+Haweis, who lived and entertained here for 14 years, was not disturbed
+by them, "even though he unearthed the entrance of a mysterious
+subterranean passage, which was believed to have communicated with the
+Lord High Admiral's House;"--a sort of semi-royal cryptoporticus of
+intrigue! Mr. Haweis also discovered the antique watergate of the
+former stately mansion--leading to the stone steps where in old days
+barges were moored,--the shelving river banks extending in those days
+far nearer than now. The great thickness of the walls of Queen's House
+may, indeed, be partly accounted for by the necessity for protection
+against floods; Mr. Haweis, who sacrilegiously cut a window to light
+the spiral staircase, had to pierce three feet of solid brickwork.
+
+Here is a funny story, retailed by Mr. Marillier, of Rossetti and the
+advancing Age of Progress:
+
+     "The only bridge along the reach" (he says) "was old Chelsea
+     Bridge, concerning which Mr. George Meredith tells me a
+     pleasant story. One day there called upon Mr. Rossetti a
+     pompous individual of the vestryman class, with a paper to
+     which he requested his signature. 'We are getting up a
+     petition,' he said, 'to replace the old wooden bridge by a
+     handsome new iron one, with gilt decorations, and I am sure
+     that you as an artist, Mr. Rossetti, will lend us the weight
+     of your name for so desirable an object.' Rossetti's
+     language, on occasion, could be more forcible than polite,
+     and his unvarnished reception of the vestryman's proposal
+     caused that rash but well-meaning person to retire with
+     extreme precipitation."
+
+Of all his many pets, Rossetti was perhaps especially devoted to his
+wombats. To one of these he addressed the lines:
+
+  "O how the family affections combat
+   Within this breast, and each hour flings a bomb at
+   My burning soul! Neither from owl nor from bat
+   Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat."
+
+At the same time, it must be confessed, the poet regretted his pet's
+inveterate tendencies toward "drain architecture." Rossetti's domestic
+proclivities must, one thinks, have rendered him a terror to his
+neighbours! Indeed, the only London inhabitant,--if we except the
+celebrated "Lady of the Cats" in the desecrated Carlyle House,--who
+can be said to have at all emulated him in that line, was Frank
+Buckland the great naturalist, who, in his house, No. 34, Albany
+Street, Regent's Park, kept "a museum and a menagerie in one." "His
+house was full of crawling, creeping, barking, flying, swimming, and
+squeaking things." When he was at church one Sunday, "Dick, the rat,"
+he relates, "stole away two five-pound notes from my drawers." Among
+other creatures Mr. Buckland kept, like Rossetti, a laughing jackass,
+who "would never laugh," and "who was only provoked to a titter by the
+consumption of a toothsome mouse"; this pet escaped from its cage one
+day and was found asleep on the bed of a gentleman near the Hampstead
+Road. But Mr. Buckland could at any rate excuse his vagaries on
+scientific grounds, for he was trying to acclimatize foreign animals
+suitable for food in this country.
+
+The fleeting tide of fashion is now at its height in Chelsea; the
+historic old houses of Cheyne Walk are let at enormous rents, and,
+year by year, tall, prosaic red-brick edifices spring up like
+mushrooms all round them. A few old "bits" of Chelsea still remain
+unaltered,--but very few. The old church, and the rectory, the home of
+the Kingsleys, with its charming old walled garden, are still
+delightful; the embankment houses, standing back behind their gardens
+and ironwork, are fine in their dignified, time-hallowed red-brick;
+Paradise Row, that picturesque oasis of old dwellings that breaks the
+ugliness of the modern Queen's Road West, yet bears witness to the
+charm of old Chelsea. In humble Paradise Row, (now part of Queen's
+Road West, and converted to laundries and other uses;)--in Paradise
+Row, with its quaint tiled roofs, dormer windows, and high white
+gate-posts, many well-known people have lived; it was even connected,
+more or less, with royalty, for in 1692 it was the dwelling place of
+the first Duke of St. Albans, Nell Gwynne's son. Chelsea has always
+been associated with the Stuarts. When it was but a picturesque
+riverside village,--fishermen's huts diversified by a few old
+palaces,--divided yet by space of green fields from the storm and
+stress of the greater London,--they brought it wealth and fashion, and
+caused its gardens to spread in fragrant greenery down to the water's
+edge. The Chelsea of the Restoration had the patronage of the
+aristocracy, as well as that of the Royal favourites; here the King's
+Mistresses flaunted their grandeur, their extravagance, their
+impecuniosity before the world. It was in comparatively humble
+Paradise Row that the notorious Duchesse de Mazarin lived in her later
+and bankrupt stage; here she entertained royally, and was, besides, in
+arrears with the Parish Rates. At No. 2 in Paradise Row lived that
+Lord Robartes, Earl of Radnor, who, like the "Vicar of Bray,"
+"trimmed" so judiciously through the Jacobite wars. This house (No.
+2.), was, by the way, said by Pepys to be "the prettiest contrived
+house he ever saw in his life."
+
+King's Road, Chelsea,--now shabby and mediocre enough, but once the
+"Merry Monarch's" own private drive, and said to have been made by him
+as an easy access to his favourites' suburban resorts,--leads,
+finally, to Fulham, and to the old house called Sandford Manor,
+traditionally ascribed to Nell Gwynne's tenancy. This ancient mansion,
+now divided into two residences, is still unharmed, though, owing to
+its too close proximity to the Gas Works, it is now unhappily
+threatened with demolition. London, as we know, has ever been more
+utilitarian than antiquarian; and perhaps the old house owes its
+escape so far to the fact that "it has been used successively as
+farmhouse, pottery, cloth manufactory, and patent cask factory."--(Mr.
+Reginald Blunt, _An Historical Hand-Book to Chelsea_.) Nevertheless,
+its pilastered doorway exists yet, and, internally, it still boasts
+its square wainscoted hall and old staircase, much as they were when
+King Charles, as the story goes, rode his pony up the stair for a
+freak. The old walnut trees, said to have been planted by Nell Gwynne
+herself, are gone; but an antiquated mulberry-tree still defies the
+railway in front of it, and the awful Gas Works behind it--a very
+Scylla and Charybdis of encroaching modernity! A delightful old house,
+and yet, surely, all its historical glamour and romance would hardly
+enable even an enthusiast to take up his abode there.
+
+The old Church of Chelsea, otherwise St. Luke's,--whose tower of
+darkened red-brick lends such picturesque effect to the Battersea
+reach beyond the Albert-Bridge,--is, both for its antiquity and its
+monuments, one of the most interesting churches in London. Its
+interior, never having been "restored," has a very old-world look; and
+it still retains, as when it was built, all the simplicity of the
+remote village church. Henry Kingsley, whose boyhood was spent in the
+delightful old Chelsea rectory, fittingly commemorates his father's
+church in his best-known story, "The Hillyars and the Burtons." "Four
+hundred years of memory," he makes Joe Burton say, "are crowded into
+that old church, and the great flood of change beats round the walls,
+and shakes the door in vain, but never enters. The dead stand thick
+together there, as if to make a brave resistance to the moving world
+outside, which jars upon their slumber. It is a church of the dead."
+Dean Stanley greatly loved this church: he used to call it "one of the
+chapters of his abbey." Here Sir Thomas More worshipped in the days of
+his power, and here, in the chapel that he built, is his monument.
+More lived himself near by, in a now vanished mansion called
+"Beaufort House," where, in his "fair garden," he received his friend
+Erasmus, and also, his king--Henry walking with his arm lovingly
+placed about his favourite's neck--that neck he was so soon to
+dissever. In Chelsea Church are the famous "chained books," Sir Hans
+Sloane's gift; the Bible, the Homilies, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs;
+enormous volumes heavily bound in leather with strong clasps, chained,
+underneath a bookcase, to a quaint lectern, where they may be read.
+This strange custom recalls the monkish days, when printed books were
+so rare and costly. The names of the guardian spirits of Chelsea, such
+as Lady Jane Cheyne and Sir Hans Sloane,--respectively lady and lord
+of the manor, after whom so many streets, squares, and courts have
+been christened,--recur here too on elaborate monuments and
+sarcophagi. Both were great benefactors to their parish church. Sir
+Hans Sloane's daughter was afterwards Lady Cadogan, and hence it was
+that the property came into the possession of the Cadogan family.
+
+Sir Hans Sloane is further commemorated in Chelsea by his gift to the
+Apothecaries' Company of the "Physick Garden," sometimes also called
+the "Botanic Garden." This pleasant green spot, barred by high
+railings, and intersected by many paths, used to contain, and contains
+this day, so far as may be, "all the herbs of _Materia Medica_ which
+can grow in the open air, for the instruction of medical students."
+The old gardens have bravely withstood the vandals and iconoclasts of
+modern Chelsea, as well as the attacks of builders, seeking what they
+may devour; but the growth of bricks and mortar round about them has
+but ill suited the delicate plants, which, it is to be feared, grow
+now but feebly for the most part. It is long since the days of the
+Stuarts,--days when the gardens of Chelsea could still grow roses.
+Nevertheless, the "Physick Garden" is still delightful for purposes
+quite other than those for which it was first made; and, fortunately,
+the terms of the bequest render its alienation difficult and unlikely.
+Perhaps, in the happy future, who knows? the garden may be opened
+altogether to the Chelsea public. Of its original cedar trees, planted
+by Sir Hans Sloane in 1683, but one now remains, and this is very
+decrepit; in its decrepitude it is, however, still quite as
+picturesque as it could ever have been in its prime. The river, in
+pre-Embankment days, flowed close by the Physick Garden, the modern
+roadway and parade being land embanked and reclaimed from the river.
+The Watergate to Sir Hans's garden has, in consequence, disappeared;
+but his statue, erected in 1733, still stands, bewigged and robed,
+chipped and stained, on its pedestal by the historic cedar tree.
+
+Close by was the site of Chelsea Ferry, and it was near here that the
+Old Swan Tavern, with its attractive wooden balconies projecting over
+the river, and an entrance from Queen's Road, used to stand. This was
+the famous tavern, house of call for barges, and resort of so many
+distinguished pleasure parties, that used to serve as goal for the
+annual race,--prototype of the modern Oxford and Cambridge race,--that
+was rowed by the young Thames watermen for the prizes of the "Doggett"
+badge and the coat full of pockets and guineas. The tavern was
+destroyed in 1873 to make room for the new Embankment, which has so
+completely changed the aspect of all this part of the river. To quote
+a writer in the _Art Journal_ for 1881:--
+
+     "No doubt the Embankment at Chelsea was needed; no doubt the
+     broad margin of mud which used to fringe old Cheyne Walk was
+     very unhealthy in summer-time; yet no one who cares for what
+     is quaint and picturesque, and who clings to relics of the
+     old days of which we shall soon have no traces left, can
+     recall the river strand at Chelsea, with its wharfs and its
+     water-stairs, its barges and its altogether indescribable
+     but most picturesque aspect, and not feel as he looks at the
+     trim even wall of the Embankment, and the broad monotonous
+     pavement above it, even if he does not say in words, 'Oh,
+     the difference to me!'"
+
+On the site of the ancient tavern is now built "Old Swan House," a
+modern-antique mansion designed in a charming style by Mr. Norman
+Shaw. A few paces westward from Old Swan House, the modern red-brick
+Tite Street, full of artists' studios and of the elect, runs up
+towards Queen's Road. Tite Street is, so far as its externals go,
+somewhat dark and shut in by its tall houses; but it more than atones
+for any outside dulness by the excessive light and learning of its
+interiors. "The White House," near the lower end of the street on the
+right, was built for Mr. Whistler. Further up the street--also on the
+right--is "Gough House," a fine old mansion of Charles II.'s time, now
+most happily adapted to the needs of the Victoria Hospital for Sick
+Children.
+
+Close to the site of the old "Rotunda" of Ranelagh, is the famous
+"Royal Military Hospital," usually called "Chelsea Hospital," and made
+familiar to all the world outside London by Herkomer's great pictures,
+"The Last Muster" and "Chelsea Pensioners." It was John Evelyn who
+first gained Charles II.'s consent to the erection of a Royal Hospital
+for veteran soldiers on this site,--though local tradition, apparently
+without any reason at all, persists in attributing its foundation to
+Nell Gwynne, who, with all her frailties, was ever the people's
+darling, and especially a Chelsea darling. The Hospital building--an
+open quadrangle with wings,--was designed by Wren. In colour as well
+as form, it is solid and reposeful--a noble example of Wren's style
+and taste. The gardens, open to the public during the day, have
+something of the calm regularity of old Dutch palaces. But then
+Chelsea, in building as in horticulture, had always a tendency to the
+neat Dutch formalism of William and Mary.
+
+A little north of Chelsea Hospital, between the modern Union Street
+and Westbourne Street, stood, in the days of the Georges, the "Old
+Original Chelsea Bun-House," that was for so long the resort of
+eighteenth-century fashion. Hither used to drive George I. and his
+consort, Caroline of Anspach; George III. and Queen Charlotte also
+came here in person to fetch their buns home, which, of course, set
+the fashion. The old house had a picturesque colonnade; but in 1839
+new proprietors rebuilt it; which rash proceeding, however, killed
+the custom.
+
+Since Stuart and early Hanoverian days, times have changed for Chelsea
+and Kensington; they are now,--as more distant Hammersmith and Fulham
+are rapidly becoming, and as Putney and Dulwich soon threaten to
+be,--integral parts of the "monster London," that, like a great
+irresistible flood, in spreading absorbs all the peaceful little pools
+that lie in its path. The squalor and the gloom, as well as the
+splendour and the riches of the great city, are now their heritage.
+Never more will the waves lap peacefully at Chelsea along the river's
+shelving shores; never again will the streets and squares of old
+Kensington regain their former seclusion and calm. Instead, a modern,
+and, let us hope, a yearly more beautiful city will spread, gradually
+and certainly, over all the available area. Chelsea and Kensington in
+the past have had many glories; who can say what splendid fortune may
+yet be theirs? And we who lament the inevitable changes of time, must
+remember that they are still living cities, hallowed by their past,
+interesting by their present, but whose greater and more enduring
+magnificence is yet to come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+BLOOMSBURY
+
+  "Some love the Chelsea river gales,
+   And the slow barges' ruddy sails,
+   And these I'll woo when glamour fails
+                              In Bloomsbury.
+
+  "Enough for me in yonder square
+   To see the perky sparrows pair,
+   Or long laburnum gild the air
+                              In Bloomsbury.
+
+  "Enough for me in midnight skies
+   To see the moons of London rise,
+   And weave their silver fantasies
+                              In Bloomsbury.
+
+  "Oh, mine in snows and summer heats,
+   These good old Tory brick-built streets!
+   My eye is pleased with all it meets
+                              In Bloomsbury."
+
+
+[Illustration: _The German Band._]
+
+The peculiar and somewhat old-world charm of Bloomsbury is, like that
+of Chelsea, only made known to her devotees. To the visitor to London,
+no less than to the fashionable dweller in the West-End, it is a
+grimy, sordid, squalid region, where slums abound, where "no nice
+people live," and where mere "going out to dinner" necessitates either
+the paying of a half-crown cab fare, or the sacrifice of an hour in
+the bone-shaking omnibus. Hence arises the custom of saying that
+"Bloomsbury is so far away." Of course, the distance or proximity of
+any part of London depends on what one chooses for the centre; but,
+taking either Oxford Circus or Charing-Cross--surely natural enough
+centres--as the diverging point, Bloomsbury is more central than any
+residential part of the metropolis. But even at the play poor
+Bloomsbury is maligned; and this, too, notwithstanding the fact that
+it is the chosen abode of so many of the theatrical profession. "They
+call the place where I live, Bloomsbury," says Mr. Todman, the old
+second-hand bookseller of _Liberty Hall_, "though why Bloomsbury, I
+don't know; for there ain't so much bloomin' as there is buryin',"
+(this, by the way, is a two-edged libel, for Bloomsbury being on high
+ground is notoriously healthy). And then the same gentleman goes on to
+remark, "they call my 'ouse a ramblin' one, though why it ain't
+rambled away to some nicer place, I can't think." We get, from the
+same play, a further impression that the Bloomsburians live mainly on
+a dish called "Smoked 'Addick." Perhaps the dramatist was led to this
+conclusion from the very pervading smell of fried fish that fills
+certain "unlovely streets" of cookshops or boarding-houses; where,
+however, in my experience the 'addick aroma has always yielded the
+palm to that of "sheeps'-trotters" or "stewed eels." Be this as it
+may, the old solidly built squares and houses of Bloomsbury have a
+dignity of their own. Some of the streets have, it is true, "come down
+in the world;" nevertheless, in their decay they retain a mournful
+look of having known better days,--a look that even their tenement
+rooms,--their broken windows, half-stuffed with paper,--their
+shock-headed dirty inmates,--cannot altogether abolish or destroy.
+Dickens, who always saw the human side of everything, has often
+noticed the peculiar pathos of some of these old, world-forgotten
+houses. In his inimitable _Sketches by Boz_ he gives a graphic account
+of the gradual decay of a house "over the water." Here, the process is
+somewhat similar. First, it changes from a private dwelling-house to a
+"select boarding-house"; then, it becomes a friendly, social affair, a
+"Home from Home"; then, its area steps become dirtier, its cook sits
+on them, shelling peas, and exchanging jokes with the milkman; it
+blossoms out in gaudy paint, like a decorator's shop; cracked
+flowerpots, of odd shapes and sizes, adorn its windows; and it
+descends, by slow degrees, yet further in the scale of "gentility,"
+till finally it becomes a mere tenement house, its juvenile population
+going in and out with jugs of beer, its area railings hung round with
+pewter milk-pots, and its door ornamented with a row of half-broken
+bell-chains for the different occupants. And, if you should chance,
+too hurriedly, to ring one of these in search of a special inhabitant,
+ten to one a cross, dirty-faced female will appear, grumbling: "Can't
+yer see as _this_ 'ere is Mrs. Smith's bell?--Two pair back--ye've
+rung the wrong 'un!"
+
+The Bloomsbury houses are pathetic, however, not so much from age, as
+because their glory has departed,--because they have had their day,
+and ceased to be; for, in the matter of actual age, few of them date
+back farther than the end of the eighteenth century. Queen Square,
+indeed, which is far prior to any of its neighbouring squares, was
+laid out in the reign of Queen Anne, in whose honour it was named, and
+whose statue still adorns it. It is a curiously shaped square, for,
+though enclosed, no houses were built at the northern end; this
+arrangement was made for the sake of the fine view of the hills of
+Highgate and Hampstead, that the square then commanded. Strange
+transformation! The Bloomsbury that we know was then all fields; the
+houses of Queen Square being, so to speak, the last sentinels of the
+London of that day! Rocques' map of 1746 gives no houses beyond the
+northern end of Southampton Row. Between Great Russell Street and the
+present Euston Road, was then open country,--called, first, the "Long
+Fields,"--then "Southampton Fields," or "Lamb's Conduit Fields."
+Earlier, they were famous for their peaches and their snipes; but in
+about 1800 they were mainly waste ground, where brawling and
+disorderly sports took place, and where superstition asserted that,
+two brothers having fought there about a lady, the footsteps they made
+in their death-struggle would never again grow grass or herb! "The
+Brothers' Steps," the place was called, or, "The Field of the Forty
+Footsteps." The present Gordon Square is said to be built upon the
+exact spot. The place had, however, always been rife with
+superstition; for here, on Midsummer-Day, in the 17th century, young
+women would come looking for a plantain leaf, to put under their
+pillows, so that they should dream of their future husbands. From
+these fields could be seen, in 1746 and far later, but two or three
+nobles' mansions, enclosed in their gardens,--such as "Bedford House,"
+pulled down to build Bedford Square,--"Baltimore House," long since
+built into Russell Square,--and "Montague House," now rebuilt as the
+British Museum;--with the old "Whitefield's Tabernacle" appearing
+through the trees towards the gardens of the ancient manor of "Toten
+Court," which gave its romantic name to the essentially unromantic
+Tottenham Court Road. (The ugly "Adam and Eve" public-house, at the
+junction of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, now occupies the
+place both of the old tavern of that name, and the older manor-house.)
+
+The name "Bloomsbury" is, however, of more remote date; it is, like
+most London appellations, a "corruption," and comes from
+"Blemundsbury," the manor of the De Blemontes, or Blemunds, in the
+reign of Henry III. Later, the manor of Bloomsbury came, together with
+that of the neighbouring St. Giles, into the possession of the Earls
+of Southampton, till in 1668 it passed with Lady Rachel,--daughter of
+Thomas Wriothesley, last Earl, by her marriage with Lord William
+Russell,--into the family of the Dukes of Bedford, the present owners.
+Lord William Russell,--who was beheaded, without a fair trial, in
+Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1683, for supposed connection with the famous
+Rye House Plot,--lived in Bedford House (formerly Southampton House),
+on the northern side of Bloomsbury, originally Southampton, Square.
+(The house occupied the whole north side of the square until pulled
+down in 1802, after the illustrious Russells had lived there for more
+than 200 years.) This was the house admired by Evelyn, in an entry in
+his diary of February 9, 1665: "Dined at my Lord Treasurer's, the
+Earle of Southampton, in Blomesbury, where he was building a noble
+square or piazza, a little towne; some noble rooms, a pretty cedar
+chapel, a naked garden to the north, but good aire". It was at first
+intended that Lord William Russell should suffer in Bloomsbury Square,
+opposite his own residence; but this was apparently opposed by the
+King as too indecent.... Poor, heroic Lady Rachel Russell! She lived
+here in retirement till her death, at the age of 86, in the reign of
+George I. She had, indeed, like Polycrates, given her treasured
+"ring", and could fear no more from fate. The great landlords of
+London may get their "unearned increment" easily enough now, yet they
+had to pay the penalty of greatness in the past!
+
+Bloomsbury Square, though now rapidly becoming simply a square of
+offices and business premises generally, was, in the time of Charles
+I, the most fashionable and most admired Square in London. Pope,
+later, alludes to it in the following couplet:
+
+      "In Palace yard, at nine, you'll find me there--
+  At ten, for certain, sir, in Bloomsbury Square--"
+
+Here, in less ancient days, lived the great judge, Lord Mansfield,
+whose house was burned during the Gordon Riots, in 1780; the mob threw
+his pictures, valuable books, and manuscripts, out of the windows and
+made a bonfire of them, while he and his wife escaped for their lives
+by the back of the building. Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the
+British Museum, lived at one time in this square; also, Sir Richard
+Steele, who, giving here a grand entertainment during financial
+distresses, was waited on by bailiffs disguised as lacqueys; and,
+finally, Isaac d'Israeli, the father of Lord Beaconsfield: who wrote
+his _Curiosities of Literature_ at No. 6. "His only amusement," says
+his son, who, as an infant, used to toddle round the square with his
+nursemaid, "was to ramble about the booksellers' shops," still so
+frequent in this vicinity. About 1760, the square was still so
+countrified that the Duchess of Bedford used to send out cards to her
+guests, inviting them to Bedford House to "take tea and walk in the
+fields"; while their coachmen "were regaled with the perfume of the
+flower-beds of the gardens in Great Russell Street." Within the
+enclosure is now a bronze statue of Charles James Fox, by Westmacott.
+
+These old London squares, with their tall plane trees, their
+luxuriant and well-ordered garden enclosures, convey a delightful
+sense, even now, of leisure and repose. No one in Bloomsbury,
+Tavistock, or Russell Squares would imagine that behind those green
+masses of foliage,--beyond the blue mist into which they melt so
+picturesquely,--lies that great "cauldron" or "fermenting vat," as
+Carlyle would say, of busy London. Yet it is there, but a stone's
+throw, indeed, away. In the squares the birds twitter and chirp;
+vistas of entwined branches, leafy glades, hide the glaring
+continuity of the streets and houses; you might think yourself in
+some suburban haunt of peace. Even the rumble of the wheels in
+neighbouring Southampton Row and Holborn seems, in Russell Square in
+summer, like a soothing tune "to rock a child asleep." You feel in
+the world, yet not of it; close to the "mighty pulse of the
+machine," yet in your garden enclosed, and at rest.... And in the
+back gardens of the houses themselves (for some of the old mansions
+yet have gardens, entered occasionally from side streets by
+mysterious Jekyll and Hyde doorways) it is the same. I know a
+"backyard" that still boasts its mulberry tree, bursting its fat
+green buds gaily in the spring; and another that can flaunt, when
+"soft April wakes," its hedge of fragrant lilac. The "daughters of
+the varying year" deign to notice us even in Bloomsbury, though they
+may not, perhaps, condescend to stay with us quite so long. (But
+then we do not ourselves, as a rule, pay such long visits in London
+as in the country.) Still, the crocus "breaks like fire" at our feet
+in the spring; the graceful bells of the foxglove usher us
+pleasantly into the autumn; and in London, imprisoned in brick, who
+shall say how we love our "prison flower?"
+
+The literary associations of Bloomsbury are yet another feature of its
+charm. Though Russell Square and its surroundings generally are being
+gradually rebuilt and improved, yet in some places you can still see
+the actual old houses standing that, in the century's early years,
+were the homes of celebrated men. Thus, No. 65 in Russell Square was
+the abode of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the painter, and here he received
+the distinguished sitters, the eminent men and fair ladies who have
+made his name famous. Here, for instance, at this common-place house
+door, while the Russian general Platoff was having his portrait
+painted inside, were posted his attendant Cossacks, "mounted" says an
+eye-witness, "on their small white horses, with their long spears
+grounded," standing as sentinels at the door of the great painter.
+Lawrence died here in 1830, and the house is not in essentials altered
+since his day. At No. 5 in the square lived, from 1856 to 1862,
+Frederick Denison Maurice, the "Christian Socialist," and here he held
+his famous "prophetic breakfasts." At No. 56 Mary Russell Mitford
+stayed in 1836. The house near by--No. 66--is a curious survival of
+the days when Bloomsbury was a centre of fashion. Its enormous size,
+its palatial reception rooms, its tall corridors, now deserted and
+solitary except for a few colossal statues in niches, all suggest the
+glare of light, the sound of music, the rustle of fine dresses that
+filled it in old days. Hawthorne and Dickens suggested that old houses
+felt and suffered; the same idea intrudes itself upon us here. The
+rusted iron arches that used in the old days to support lamps,--now
+darkened,--still hang here and there in Bloomsbury streets; and, in
+some cases the actual iron torch-extinguishers that were used when
+sedan chairs were in fashion, remain to tell their story of ancient
+grandeur. Nothing is in its way more plaintive than an old and
+desolate house of this kind; its glory departed, its decorations
+falling to decay, its "garden" a wilderness of walls, roofs, and
+broken bottles, its rooms, even, perchance, in course of being broken
+up into solicitors' or other offices. Bloomsbury Square, indeed--the
+square nearest to Holborn--has, in this way, entirely merged into
+offices, the residents being practically ousted. But Russell Square,
+despite the new Russell Hotel that rises palatially along its
+north-eastern block, and despite the large Pitman's School of
+Shorthand at its south-eastern corner, is still almost entirely
+residential. None of its modern innovations can altogether abolish or
+destroy the spirit and feeling of Thackeray that it breathes. Here
+lived old Osborne, the purse-proud banker; there is going on old
+Sedley's sale; I can see the packing-cases, the "loafers" and the vans
+at this moment; and here, by these very prosaic green square railings,
+is Amelia, sad and black garbed, looking with tear-filled eyes for her
+boy George. Now that she comes into the light, I see that she is only
+a nurse from one of the Great Ormond Street or Queen Square hospitals,
+or, perhaps, a "Salvation Army" lassie; but for the moment she _was_
+Amelia, poke-bonnet and all, to the life. Even the historic square
+railings are just the same as when Thackeray drew them, and Amelia
+beside them, in ch. 50 of _Vanity Fair_. The numerous pupils of
+Pitman's Shorthand Institute now flock, unprotected, down Southampton
+Row, where little Amelia and her kind, in the early years of the
+century, walked, followed by "Black Sambo," with an enormous cane.
+Little Amelia, whose simple strolls in the square were guarded by the
+beadle; and before whose door, when asleep, "the watchman sang the
+hours." The big houses--their fireplaces and ceilings often decorated
+by Adam, their "powder-closets," curious relics of Queen Anne's time,
+still existing, in many cases, behind the drawing-rooms--yet flaunt
+their enormous kitchens, laundries, and basements, fitted with endless
+bedrooms and offices for butlers and retainers, such as old Mr.
+Sedley's "Black Sambo" and his tribe. They are out of date in this
+region now, but the Bedford estate will not remodel them entirely so
+long as their outer walls are solid; and that these mansions existed
+long before the modern jerry-building days, their firm walls give
+abundant proof.
+
+But change is at work everywhere in this region. Flats ascending to a
+terrific height are erected in every direction; of these "Bedford
+Court," with its foreign-looking inner glazed courtyard is the most
+outwardly picturesque. It does not seem long since the "gates and
+bars" went; and soon, no doubt, a new Electric Railway will continue
+its tunnels and stations along Southampton Row from Holborn to King's
+Cross.
+
+The principal reason, of course, for the modern unfashionableness of
+Bloomsbury is to be found in its inhabitants; it is, practically, a
+city of cheap boarding-houses. It will be interesting to see how the
+big new Russell Hotel in Russell-Square will affect these. Though
+boarding-houses are vetoed in the big squares, they abound everywhere
+else. They are chiefly frequented by Americans and Germans, who,
+through the late summer and autumn, throng the streets, generally
+discoverable by their red "Baedekers," no less than by their speech.
+It is, in fact, in July or August, more common, just here, to hear
+German spoken than English. London, it has been ascertained, attracts
+now a greater number of tourists than any other place in the world,
+and these tourists mostly lodge in Bloomsbury. The theatrical world,
+also, lives largely about here--it is so convenient for the theatres;
+but it prefers, for its part, private lodgings, or flats. Yet, even
+with all this yearly influx from other nations, Bloomsbury is
+wonderfully little known to the world of shops or of fashion. Oxford
+Circus is only distant ten minutes from the Russell Hotel, yet "where
+is Russell Square?" is no uncommon question, even in a shop as big as
+Peter Robinson's. "Where is Russell Square?" is, indeed, an almost
+classical question; for it was made in so august a place as the House
+of Commons, by so omniscient a being as Mr. Croker. It is
+crushing--but so it is. You might as well, in the world's eyes, live
+at Fulham or Kennington Park. "Why do you live so far away?" is a
+question constantly asked of the Bloomsbury resident by people from
+distant Battersea or Campden Hill, whom it would be useless to try to
+undeceive. "The very absence of any knowledge of this locality," said
+a noted wit, "is accounted a mark of high breeding." Among those who
+have spoken despitefully of Bloomsbury is Mr. Gladstone. Sir Algernon
+West records a conversation about Panizzi, and his "sad, ill days
+before his death," "which Mr. Gladstone attributed greatly to the
+fact of his living in Bloomsbury Square." But, with all respect to Mr.
+Gladstone, it may be submitted that Panizzi would have died anywhere,
+while, on the other hand, he could not have lived anywhere except in
+his beloved Museum-land. Bloomsbury, too, is Whig territory, and it
+was too bad of Mr. Gladstone to identify it with the Inferno.
+
+Its social glory may have passed away from Bloomsbury, but pathetic
+little scenes from a lower strata of life daily enact themselves here
+before our eyes. For the poor we have, indeed, always with us. Here,
+for instance, to a certain humble street corner, has come for many
+years an old blind man who sells collar-studs. He arrives punctually
+every morning, led along carefully by his wife. Once arrived, his mode
+of procedure is always the same.
+
+He first goes to an iron railing attached to an uninviting blind wall,
+and proceeds, with a key, to extract thence a rickety wooden seat,
+padlocked on to the railing. This he takes to his accustomed spot, an
+old hoarding of ancient date, where he is allowed by sufferance of the
+authorities; when the hoarding is removed, the old man will lose his
+means of living unless he find another haunt. His wife helps him
+across the road, and leaves him to sit patiently all day, east wind,
+wet, or shine, selling studs. At five o'clock she again appears to
+fetch him home to tea. Once I witnessed a little domestic drama
+between the two. It arose thus. The old man had been talking one day
+to another woman,--a decrepit old waif she was,--and, when the wife
+returned, the poor old husband had to expiate his flirtation sorely.
+His wife "let him have it" all the way over the return crossing,
+undeterred by passing 'buses, or cabmens' jeers, from "speaking her
+mind"; and she was still hard at it, to judge from her thin shoulders
+and her gesticulations, as they passed out of sight together into the
+foggy night.
+
+[Illustration: _The Pavement Artist._]
+
+"Pavement artists," too, select the near neighbourhood of the squares
+as their favoured haunt. These "open-air pastellists," as they have
+been called, are a curious, unshaven, dilapidated race, with an
+indescribable "come-down-in-the world" look about them; and their lot
+seems hardly an enviable one. Their "plant," it is true, is not large;
+a few coloured chalks and a soft duster form all their necessary
+stock-in-trade. Gifted often with a fair amount of technical ability,
+they lead the passerby to wonder, whether, given happier circumstances
+and a less vivid acquaintance with the bar of the public house, they
+might not now be exhibiting their efforts on the sacred walls of the
+Royal Academy. Not that the Royal Academy pictures themselves would,
+for that matter, if they could be painted on the pavement, draw so
+many coppers as the lurid representations of railway accidents, or
+the scenes of domestic bliss, or the "Mother's Grave" (the public love
+sentiment and pathos), or even the innocent mackerel or salmon, "as
+like as like," that form the _repertoire_ of the pavement artist. His
+wares, to catch pennies, have to be highly coloured, if nothing else.
+His trials are many; dust and rain efface his pictures, drunken
+navvies fall foul of him, cramp attacks his legs, and east wind
+benumbs his fingers, till, poor wretch, no wonder that he repairs,
+with his hardly won money, to the nearest public-house,--the poor
+man's refuge. He is, on the other hand, not obliged to rise early or
+to work after dark, and it is said that occasionally his takings
+average as much as 4/6 per day, although an amateur who recently tried
+his hand at the business only gained 3-1/2_d_, a violent headache, and
+nearly a sunstroke. There is, it is true, a new and degenerate kind of
+Pavement Artist, who, instead of painstakingly bedaubing the same
+"pitch" day after day, brings out with him a series of highly-coloured
+oil-pictures on cardboard; the public, however, have already
+discovered him to be a hollow fraud. There is also said to be in
+existence one young lady pavement artist, in sailor hat and neat
+get-up (though where her present "pitch" may be I know not), who
+labels herself proudly "the only one in England."
+
+That Londoners are great lovers of the picturesque may be seen from
+the admiring crowd that surround the pavement artist; they prefer
+Nature, however, brought "home" to them in crude and garish colours.
+Yet, as likely as not, when the shabby pastellist has put away chalks
+and duster for the day, and betaken himself to his nightly refuge in
+Soho or Hatton Garden, the sky behind him will robe itself in intense
+hues of orange, purple, and crimson that baffle imitation, and before
+which even pavement-art fades into insignificance. For the
+sunset-skies of London are a marvel. All through the varying year they
+are beautiful, but in September and October they are at their best.
+The sun either sinks, a bold red disc, behind the black houses and
+still blacker plane trees, or it clothes its retreat with bright
+purple and madder clouds, against which, with their golden background,
+the tree branches show dark like prison-bars. Was it perhaps, on these
+sunset-skies that Christina Rossetti gazed when she wrote her most
+inspired poems? And was it from the small window of her gloomy little
+house in Torrington Square, "the small upper back bedroom whose only
+outlook," her biographer says, "was to the tall dingy walls of
+adjacent houses;" was it from here that,--looking with rapt gaze over
+to the neighbouring stables and mews,--she saw, in fancy, the angel
+choirs of which she wrote?
+
+  "... Multitudes--multitudes--stood up in bliss,
+   Made equal to the angels, glorious, fair;
+   With harps, palms, wedding-garments, kiss of peace,
+   And crowned and haloed hair."
+
+Indeed it is not unlikely that she did see them, for the true poet's
+mind sees what it brings, to the exclusion of all meaner things. There
+is a pretty story told, in this connection, of William Blake, the
+poor, half-crazed poet-painter of Fountain Court. "What," he said, "it
+will be questioned" (of me) "when the sun rises, do you not see a
+round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? Oh! no, no! I see an
+innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying 'Holy, holy, holy, is
+the Lord God Almighty!' I question not my corporeal eye any more than
+I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and
+not with it." And thus it was with Miss Rossetti. She, the patient,
+noble, suffering woman,--suffering, latterly, from a long and painful
+illness,--lay, day after day silent and uncomplaining, in that dismal
+little London house where she had spent nineteen years of her
+life,--her soul ever beating its prison-bars. Near by in the
+neighbouring Woburn Square, is Christ Church, where Miss Rossetti
+during her life was a constant attendant, and whose incumbent, the
+Rev. J. J. Glendinning Nash, was her close friend. Here her impressive
+funeral service (where her own poems were sung) took place on January
+2nd 1895. The whole of this part of London is bound up with the lives
+of the talented Rossetti family. Christina, her mother, and aunts,
+lived at No 30 Torrington Square--and before that at 5 Endsleigh
+Gardens; W. M. Rossetti, the younger brother and literary critic,
+lived near by, close to Regent's Park; and Dante Rossetti, the chief
+of this family of poets, was, as we know, a thorough Londoner, and
+never even visited Italy at all. One of the most curious things about
+London is the way in which, despite its gloom, it inspires and
+stimulates the poet's thought, "moulding the secret gold." Else why is
+it that so many beautiful things are produced there? Even Mr. Austin
+Dobson's Muse, he complains, "pouts" when abroad, though "she is not
+shy on London stones!" The many-hued beauties of the country do not
+affect us as do the grey London stones and streets, eloquent with
+association and history.
+
+If the Rossetti family are deeply connected with Bloomsbury streets
+and squares,--William Morris, the poet of _The Earthly Paradise_, the
+Socialist, designer, prophet of the House Beautiful, is hardly less
+so. It was in unromantic Bloomsbury that his ideas of beauty were
+mainly nourished; Oxford Street, Upton, and Kelmscott came later.
+Bloomsbury, whose drawing and painting schools are immortalised in
+Thackeray's novels (_vide_ "Gandish's," in _The Newcomes_,), has
+always been more or less a focus of art teaching. Bohemian in old
+days, it is mildly Bohemian still, as any one who frequents the
+art-schools of the neighbourhood will testify. When Morris first left
+Oxford, in 1856, he and Burne-Jones took rooms together in Upper
+Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, as being a convenient locality for the
+study of art. Here they fell in with other kindred spirits, such as
+Holman Hunt and Rossetti. "Topsy" (Morris) "and I lived together,"
+Burne Jones wrote in 1856, "in the quaintest room in all London, hung
+with brasses of old knights and drawings of Albert Duerer." In the
+following year (1857) they removed to 17 Red Lion Square, a house
+already consecrated to the early pioneers of the Pre-Raphaelite
+Brotherhood:
+
+     "It was a first-floor set of three rooms; the large room in
+     front looked north, and its window had been heightened up to
+     the ceiling to adapt it for use as a studio: behind it was a
+     bedroom, and behind that another small bedroom or powdering
+     closet. Till the spring of 1859 this was their London
+     residence and working place, and it is round Red Lion Square
+     that much of the mythology of Morris's earlier life
+     clusters. From the incidents which occurred or were invented
+     there, a sort of Book of the Hundred Merry Tales gradually
+     was formed, of which Morris was the central figure."--(_Life
+     of W. Morris, by J. W. Mackail._)
+
+"A great many of these stories are connected with the maid of the
+house, who became famous under the name of 'Red Lion Mary.' She was
+very plain, but a person of great character and unfailing good
+humour.... One of the tales told of her shows her imperturbable good
+nature. Rossetti one day, on her entering the room, strode up to her,
+and in deep resonant tones, with fearful meaning in his voice,
+declaimed the lines:
+
+  "'Shall the hide of a fierce lion
+    Be stretched on a couch of wood
+    For a daughter's foot to lie on,
+    Stained with a father's blood?'
+
+"Whereupon the girl, quite unawed by the horrible proposition, replied
+with baffling complacency, 'It shall if you like, sir'!"
+
+From the fact of the Red Lion Square rooms being unfurnished came
+practically the beginnings of Morris's work as a decorator and
+manufacturer. He set to work to provide it with "intensely mediaeval
+furniture," designed by himself, and painted in panels afterwards by
+Rossetti and Burne-Jones. There were tables, chairs, and a large
+settle; "chairs," says Rossetti, "such as Barbarossa might have sat
+in." It is pleasant to think of Morris and Rossetti walking arm-in-arm
+on summer evenings, wending their way through quaint alleys up to the
+Red Lion Square lodgings, deep in earnest conversation; young,
+intensely busy and hopeful--still more intensely full of "the joy of
+life." They spent their holidays at the not far distant Zoological
+Gardens, where Morris, who was fond of birds, would observe and
+imitate the habits of eagles:
+
+     "He would imitate an eagle with considerable skill and
+     humour, climbing on to a chair, and, after a sullen pause,
+     coming down with a soft heavy flop; and for some time an owl
+     was one of the tenants of Red Lion Square, in spite of a
+     standing feud between it and Rossetti."
+
+Morris had several Bloomsbury abodes. Later, when he married, and the
+Red Lion Square household broke up, he and his wife went into lodgings
+at 41, Great Ormond Street; and again, some five or six years later,
+they took an old house, 26 Queen Square, (now pulled down to make room
+for a hospital), a house which, with its yard and outbuildings behind,
+had room and to spare for his family, and also for workshops to
+accommodate his increasing trade as a decorative manufacturer. It is
+sad that London houses where Morris lived should bear no trace of his
+beautifying hand; for externally, it must be confessed, such of his
+Bloomsbury dwellings as remain extant are commonplace. Red Lion
+Square, a curiously antiquated enclosure near Holborn, approached by
+paved diverging alleys at the eastern corners, and with a pathetic
+look of having known better days (it is now mostly offices and
+business flats), contains but few dwelling-houses. No. 17 still
+stands, but the only thing about it that seems to suggest the Morris
+tradition is its plain green door; and it differs from its neighbours
+merely by its middle first-floor window being "heightened up to the
+ceiling" as already described. Neither is 41, Great Ormond Street--one
+of the smaller houses in that dignified old street--in any way
+remarkable, except for its rather dilapidated look. It seems a pity,
+by the way, that tablets do not more frequently indicate the houses
+where great people have lived; the dullest of London streets would
+gain infinitely in interest were this the rule, instead of merely the
+exception.
+
+Queen Square, though its old houses have mostly been rebuilt as
+large hospitals, and only a few of them remain, still has a charming
+old world look. Great Ormond Street, with its tall old mansions of
+time-darkened red brick, their quaint overhanging porch roofs, and
+their often elaborate iron-work, runs into it at one end; while the
+other--curious anomaly at this date!--is still a deadlock of
+enclosed gardens, with no thoroughfare into dull Guilford street
+beyond. This,--and it is a fact that of itself speaks well for the
+health of the district,--is a region of hospitals; hence the
+occasional whiff of ether or scent of iodine from bandaged
+"out-patients" that greets the traveller by omnibus up Southampton
+Row. The high ground on which Bloomsbury is built (for it is a
+gradual ascent all the way from the river to Russell Square) render
+it, its fogs and soot notwithstanding,--and despite the old
+tradition that the victims of the plague were mainly buried
+here,--far more bracing then the more fashionable West End. It has,
+certainly, its quota of fogs, or "London particulars" as Sam Weller
+called them; but so have other parts of London. In and about Great
+Ormond Street and Queen Square are many hospitals; large, airy, and
+splendidly managed institutions, such, for instance, as the
+well-known Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, (abused
+as "hideous" by Mr. Hare, principally because "two interesting
+houses, Nos. 48 and 49," of real Queen Anne architecture, were
+destroyed in 1882 to enlarge it); the National Hospital for Epilepsy
+and Paralysis, under the great Dr. Ferrier; and the tall newly-built
+Alexandra Hospital for children. In Powis Place, close to Queen
+Square, Lord Macaulay lived in early manhood with his family. The
+house is now joined to the Homoeopathic Hospital.
+
+In Great Ormond Street, also, on the northern side, is the "Working
+Men's College," the history of which is so deeply associated with
+Ruskin, Rossetti, Madox Brown, and their friends. Started first by F.
+D. Maurice at 31, Red Lion Square, (where Rossetti and Ruskin
+subsequently volunteered to hold classes, Rossetti "teaching mechanics
+to draw each other," and Ruskin instructing them in the more
+rudimentary art of copying leaves, flowers, &c., according to the
+"strictest school of Ruskinianism;")--it was subsequently moved to its
+present site. In the lives of this gifted community of artists and
+teachers, the Working Men's College played no small part, and showed
+how deeply these young men were actuated, not only by the love of art,
+but also by the feeling of universal brotherhood advocated later by
+Morris in the social Utopia he propounded in one of his best known
+works. The story of the College may be read in many books and
+biographies. The kind of thing it practised, being rare in those days,
+attracted strangers and philanthropic aristocrats, who came to look on
+and to wonder. Irreverent stories, indeed, are told of the classes
+there by mild scoffers,--such as W. B. Scott, for instance,--who
+describes Mr. Ruskin's class, as follows:
+
+     "We drove into Red Lion Square, and here I found ... every
+     one trying to put on small pieces of paper, imitations by
+     pen and ink of pieces of rough stick crusted with dry
+     lichens!... I came away feeling that such pretence of
+     education was in a high degree criminal--it was intellectual
+     murder!"
+
+For Mr. Scott, who was, as he says, "the representative of the
+Government schools," some allowance must be made; but Dante Rossetti
+himself, though he held a "life"-class, also saw the comic side. "You
+think," he said to Mr. Scott:
+
+     "You think I have turned humanitarian, perhaps, but you
+     should see my class for the model! None of your _Freehand
+     Drawing-Books_ used. The British mind is brought to bear on
+     the British _mug_ at once, and with results that would
+     astonish you."
+
+On the actual value of these things, opinions, as we see, may differ;
+but who can doubt the indirect good that resulted from the effort,
+both to teachers and to taught?
+
+The Passmore Edwards Settlement, in Tavistock Place, goes perhaps,
+far to realise some of the ideas of Morris's Utopia. To begin with, it
+is a thing of beauty. Its newness is not aggressive, and its long
+red-brick building, adorned by quaint porches and backed by refreshing
+green plane-trees, is a pleasing object as viewed from the essentially
+unromantic and grimy street into which it opens. Its architecture is a
+credit to the two young men who designed it. Though the building, I
+believe, at first excited some adverse comment in Bloomsbury circles,
+yet there can be no doubt of its success as a whole. Its style, simple
+yet decorative, gains on the beholder. While, externally, it forms a
+little "isle of quiet breathing" in Bloomsbury streets, its
+proportions and general construction are internally, no less charming.
+The big lecture-hall with its white arched roof, its many windows, the
+beautifully-proportioned drawing-room with its lovely colouring of
+green and red, the well-stocked library, the gymnasium, the
+sewing-rooms, the cooking-school, are all arranged and decorated in
+the Morris style, and according to Morris's ideas.... Mrs. Humphry
+Ward, as every one knows, is the inspiring spirit of the Settlement,
+and Mr. Tatton is her warden and prophet. The present building, for
+which the funds were principally provided by Mr. Passmore Edwards of
+the _Echo_, is the outcome of Mrs. Ward's earlier "settlement" in
+Gordon Square. It was built in 1897 on the site of a curious old house
+called "The Grove," which stood apart in its own grounds; a house
+where Herschel lived and where he first weighed the world; where,
+also, report says, that George IV. kept one of his numerous "ladies."
+The Settlement, which is of the Toynbee Hall type, is unsectarian, and
+therefore looked coldly on by many church people; though, by the
+admitted good it works, it has overcome many prejudices. Among the
+most novel, and assuredly the most excellent, of its works is the
+Cripples' School which is conducted within its walls. It is a pathetic
+sight to see the vehicle--half omnibus and half ambulance--carrying
+these poor little pupils to and from the Settlement. Also, it
+ministers to the highest pleasures of the people; and it is far more
+difficult to teach enjoyment than to teach learning. Gymnasiums,
+cooking, and social gatherings for all classes alike pave, at any
+rate, the way to still larger "departures" and Ruskinian possibilities
+in the way of "preaching to the rich and dining with the poor." The
+pretty drawing-room of the Settlement looks, with its bay window, on
+to a charming green garden once backed by Dickens's old
+house,--Tavistock House,--now demolished.
+
+Literary memories attach even to Gower Street; that long, prosaic,
+interminable thoroughfare.
+
+Here, at No. 110 (then No. 12, Upper Gower Street, and now utilized
+with neighbouring houses as Shoolbred's offices), lived, in 1839,
+Charles Darwin; it was described by his son as "a small, commonplace
+London house, with a dining room in front, and a small room behind, in
+which they lived for quietness." Though Darwin sometimes grumbled, as
+men will, over the necessity of living in "dirty odious London," he
+also appreciated its peculiar charm, as the following extract will
+testify:
+
+     "We are living a life of extreme quietness. What you
+     describe as so secluded a spot is, I will answer for it,
+     quite dissipated compared with Gower Street. We have given
+     up all parties, for they agree with neither of us; and if
+     one is quiet in London there is nothing like it for
+     quietness.... There is a grandeur about its smoky fogs, and
+     the dull, distant sounds of cabs and coaches; in fact, you
+     may perceive I am becoming a thorough-paced cockney, and I
+     glory in the thought that I shall be here for the next six
+     months."
+
+In 1835, too, as Mr. Frith recalls in his amusing _Reminiscences_, he
+himself was a boy, just introduced to his first drawing academy,
+immortalized as "Gandish's" in the _Newcomes_; that of Mr. Henry Sass,
+which still stands, a corner house at No. 6 Charlotte Street, the
+Holborn continuation of Gower Street. At the side entrance, under the
+classic bust of Minerva,--which, yellowed and antique in more senses
+than one, "to this day looks down on the passer-by;"--under this
+doorway came not only Frith, but Millais, and other well-known
+Academicians. Edward Lear, of much _Nonsense Book_ fame, and much
+undeserved neglect as a landscape-painter, "a man of varied and great
+accomplishments," was also one of Sass's pupils.
+
+Millais, when a boy attending Sass's school, lived with his parents at
+83, Gower Street (the studio was built out behind). Mr. Holman Hunt
+thus describes the Millais _menage_ at the time:
+
+     "It (the studio) was comfortably furnished with artistic
+     objects tastefully arranged.... The son put his hand on his
+     father's shoulder and the other on his mother's chair, and
+     said: 'They both help me, I can tell you. He's capital! and
+     does a lot of useful things. Look what a good head he has. I
+     have painted several of the old doctors from him. By making
+     a little alteration and putting a beard on him he does
+     splendidly, and he sits for hands and draperies, too; and as
+     for mamma, she finds me all I want in the way of dresses,
+     and makes them up for me. She reads to me, too, at times,
+     and finds out whatever I want to know at the British Museum
+     library. She's very clever, I can tell you,' and he stooped
+     down and rubbed his curly head against her forehead, and
+     then patted the 'old daddy,' as he called him, on the back."
+
+It was close to Sass's old school, and opposite his benign Minerva,
+that I once saw, myself, one bitter May-Day of nipping "north-easter,"
+the real old "Jack-in-the-Green" described by Dickens and illustrated
+by Cruikshank; the "May-Day sweeps" of the _Sketches by Boz_; "my
+lord," "my lady," "clowns," "green," and all. Very wretched and
+miserable looked these belated illustrators of an ancient custom, as
+they danced and piped through the wind and sleet that usually, by some
+strange perversity, usher in the first of May. The Cockney children
+who storm the doorsteps, clamorously demanding May-Day tribute, and
+crying their shrilly monotonous song:
+
+  "Fust er Ma--ay,
+   Dawn er da--ay,
+   It's only once a yee--ar"--
+
+are usually suggestive of a cold, cheerless morn.
+
+At the present day, many members of the legal profession still
+inhabit Bloomsbury, recalling the old days when, from its residents,
+it was dubbed "Judge-Land." Its proximity to Fleet Street renders it
+equally beloved by writers; its nearness to the Strand endears it to
+"the profession" and the music-hall artistes, who frequent the flats
+near Tottenham Court Road; but the bulk of the residential population
+is Jewish. Bloomsbury has, however, not only been the chosen abode of
+judges, journalists, and Jews, but it is also the home of many sects
+and religious communities, some important, and some, if report be
+true, mustering but few adherents. There is a by-way off Lamb's
+Conduit Street (which is a thoroughfare at the back of Great Ormond
+Street, containing, like it, some quaint old houses, as well as some
+interesting curiosity-shops); in this by-way is a tiny building,
+pathetic in its minuteness, and chiefly discernible from its
+projecting gas-lamp, labelled "Church of Humanity." Of this church, a
+wit is said to have unkindly remarked, with reference to the size of
+its congregation, that it contained "three persons, but no God."
+Unitarians muster largely round the Bloomsbury squares; and the
+Irvingites, or, as they call themselves, members of "the Catholic and
+Apostolic Church," have their principal place of worship,--a fine
+building erected for them in 1853,--in Gordon Square. Its door
+is--rare indeed in London!--always open, enabling the visitor to enter
+and admire the long cloister that leads to the church, and the
+decorated interior with its triforium, wheel-window, and side-chapel.
+The prayer-books lying in the pews seem much the same as those used by
+the English Church, the chief difference being that in them the word
+"saint" is always rendered as "angel." This beautiful church and its
+strange creed result from the doctrines propounded by Edward Irving,
+the Annandale prophet and seer, the preacher of "the gift of tongues,"
+who was himself ordained the first "angel" or minister of his sect.
+(This Edward Irving was the first lover of Jane Welsh Carlyle,--the
+man of whom she said, that if she had married him, "there would have
+been no gift of tongues!")
+
+Whitefield's Tabernacle, that early home of Dissent,--where, in 1824,
+Edward Irving delivered his famous missionary oration of
+three-and-a-half hours,--stands near by in Tottenham Court Road.
+Erected first by the preacher George Whitefield in 1756, and called
+then "Whitefield's Soul Trap,"--it has been many times rebuilt,--and
+is now just re-opened as an imposing red-brick and ornate edifice, on
+its original site. Notwithstanding its deplorable newness, it
+perpetuates the memory of Whitefield, Toplady, and John Wesley; and it
+was here, by a curious coincidence, that two ministers preached their
+own funeral sermons!
+
+With Carlyle too, although his chosen home was in far-away Chelsea,
+Bloomsbury has associations. At No. 6 Woburn Buildings,--in a dingy
+little paved by-way close to New St. Pancras Church, Euston
+Road,--Carlyle lodged for a short time in 1831--when trying to get his
+_Sartor Resartus_ taken by a publisher. In these lodgings ("a very
+beautiful sitting-room, quiet and airy" he describes it), Edward
+Irving, his friend, had also stayed. And 5 Ampton Street, Mecklenburgh
+Square, was another London lodging of Carlyle's--frequented before the
+Chelsea days began in 1834. But, of the many literary men who have
+lived in and around Bloomsbury, none is more associated with the
+locality than Charles Dickens. Tavistock House has been recently
+pulled down; it was an unassuming, ugly, semi-detached dwelling with a
+heavy portico, one of three houses all now destroyed, railed off from
+the eastern side of Tavistock Square, and entered from it through an
+iron gateway. This was the novelist's home for ten years, from 1850 to
+1860. He, and his famous New Year's theatricals, are still a
+recollection of the older residents in the neighbourhood. The annual
+plays of Tavistock House, performed "in a theatre erected in the
+garden," and written and stage-managed under the collaboration of
+Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, are now matter of history. _Bleak
+House_ was the earliest work written here. The house after Dickens's
+time became a Jews' college, and the pupils "recreated" in the
+novelist's theatre-garden. It is now a sad scene of desolation.
+Memories of Bloomsbury haunt many of Dickens's works, but none are
+better or more lifelike in their way than his early sketches of the
+immortal Mrs. Tibbs--type of her class--and her select boarding house
+in Great Coram Street, in "that partially explored tract of country
+which lies between the British Museum and a remote village called
+Somers Town." Mrs. Tibbs's advertisement to the effect that "six
+individuals would meet with all the comforts of a cheerful musical
+home in a select private family, residing within ten minutes' walk of
+everywhere," is still not uncommonly met with.
+
+But the literary memories of Bloomsbury are like the sands of the sea
+for multitude. They may be found even in the dingy streets running
+east of Tavistock Square, leading north towards the tram-lines and
+general squalor of King's Cross. At No. 26 Marchmont Street, the
+youthful Shelley and the still more youthful Mary Godwin, afterwards
+Shelley's second wife, lived in 1815, before Harriet's death and their
+own legal marriage; and here their first baby was born and died.
+"Shelley and Clara go out about a cradle," Mary's diary records, a few
+days after the infant's birth. Here Mary read _Corinne_ and
+_Rinaldini_, and mourned over her little dead child, "a span-long dead
+baby, and in the lodgings in Marchmont Street an empty cradle."
+Possibly Marchmont Street then was not quite so slummy as it is now;
+but this young couple, treading "the bright Castalian brink and
+Latmos' steep," were probably just as unconscious of London mud as of
+any disorder, actual or moral, in their establishment.
+
+At 54, Hunter Street, a street just east of Marchmont Street, and now
+exhibiting, in all its phases, the gradual decay described by Dickens,
+John Ruskin was born in 1819; and here, as he describes in
+_Praeterita_, he used, at the age of four, to enjoy from his nursery
+window "the view of a marvellous iron post, out of which the
+water-carts were filled through beautiful little trap-doors, by pipes
+like boa constrictors," a mystery which, he says, he was never weary
+of contemplating. If any such little observant boy should happen to
+live there now, he would have something further to contemplate, to
+wit, the frequent green omnibuses, for this is now the much-travelled
+omnibus route between the stations of King's Cross and Victoria.
+Hunter Street runs into Brunswick Square, where, at No. 32, the
+_Punch_ artist John Leech lived for ten years, and suffered many
+afflictions at the hands of persistent organ-grinders, who, if they
+did not really shorten his life, at any rate aggravated the illness of
+which he died. London is conservative in its habits, and
+organ-grinders, trooping in from their neighbouring home of Hatton
+Garden--even occasionally a low type of nigger minstrels--still haunt
+this spot, as they do all places, for that matter, where
+boarding-houses congregate. The regular attendance of what is termed a
+"piano-organ" always denotes a boarding-house; the louder its screech
+the better, for the boarder seems fond of noise. His mode of life is
+peculiar and unique. He will sit on the balcony smoking, or eat his
+dinner with his friends almost in public; it is all the same to him.
+Such sign-manuals betray the "select boarding establishment" almost as
+much as does the row of five ornate cracked glazed pots, yellow and
+blue alternately, that adorn its lower windows; or to quote Dickens:
+"the meat-safe looking blinds in the parlour windows, blue and gold
+curtains in the drawing-room, and spring roller blinds all the way
+up." Adjoining Brunswick Square on the west is Great Coram Street,
+where (at No. 13), Thackeray lived when first married, and wrote his
+_Paris Sketch Book_. This district has been altered lately by tall
+ugly workmen's flats; but Great and Little Coram Street still
+perpetuate the memory of old Captain Thomas Coram, the benevolent sea
+captain, and originator of the well-known Foundling Hospital close by
+in Guilford Street. This picturesque and important institution is a
+kind of show place on Sundays, to which many visitors are taken. The
+chapel services, with the raised tiers of boys and girls singing in
+trained choir on each side of the big organ presented by Handel, not
+only please alike the eye and ear, but have the indescribable charm of
+pathos. As Mrs. Meagles in Dickens's novel (_Little Dorrit_) well
+expresses it:
+
+     "Oh dear, dear" (she sobbed), "when I saw all those children
+     ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none
+     of them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us
+     all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched mother ever come
+     here, and look among those young faces, wondering which is
+     the poor child she brought into this forlorn world, never
+     through its life to know her love, her kiss, her face, her
+     voice, even her name!"
+
+Blake's poem pictures the scene:
+
+  "Oh, what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town!
+   Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own;
+   The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
+   Hundreds of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands."
+
+In the early days of the hospital, first established in Hatton Garden
+in 1740, the admission of unwanted children was more or less
+indiscriminate, and the mortality among them--packed for transit from
+the country in some cases "five infants in a basket"--enormous. Now it
+is only a "foundling" hospital in that it receives illegitimate
+children, who must not be more than a year old, and whose mothers must
+personally apply and state their case. The "tokens" left with the
+babies in the early days of the institution as means of future
+identification, are preserved in the hospital. Some of them are very
+curious:
+
+     "Coins of an ancient date ... a playing card--the ace of
+     hearts--with a dolorous piece of verse written upon it; a
+     ring with two hearts in garnets, broken in half, and then
+     tied together; three or four padlocks, intended, we suppose,
+     as emblems of security; a nut, an ivory fish, an anchor, a
+     gold locket, a lottery ticket. Sometimes a piece of brass,
+     either in the shape of a heart or a crescent moon, was used
+     as a distinguishing mark, generally engraved with some
+     little verse or legend. Thus one has these words upon it,
+     'In amore haec sunt vitia'; another has this bit of
+     doggerel:--
+
+          "You have my heart;
+           Though we must part."
+
+By admission, after the service, to the long dining-hall, the visitors
+are allowed to see the children's temporal, as well as their
+spiritual, wants well attended to. Hogarth's _March to Finchley_, a
+picture which he practically presented to the hospital, hangs in its
+picture gallery, and testifies to the painter's interest in the
+institution. The hospital's playing-grounds look into Lamb's Conduit
+Street, where often through the railings passers-by stand and gaze at
+the children in their quaint uniform, the boys in red and brown,
+playing on one side of the gravelled enclosure; the girls, in brown
+frocks with white caps, tuckers, and aprons, on the other. In
+Mecklenburgh Square, which adjoins the hospital on the east,--the most
+curiously secluded square, surely, in all London,--lived George
+Augustus Sala, the well-known journalist, whose house was a perfect
+museum of curiosities and works of art. "Highly respectable but not at
+all fashionable," is the cruel sentence pronounced both upon this
+square and its neighbour Brunswick Square. The broken-nosed statue of
+the girl with a pitcher, that stands opposite the big iron gates of
+the Foundling Hospital (at the opening of Lamb's Conduit Street),
+shows how much less reverently inclined the youth of London are to
+art, than the Florentine.
+
+This, on a day of atmospheric charm, a day haloed by blue depths of
+mist, is, to the chastened eye of the constant Londoner, one of
+Bloomsbury's prettiest spots. But others there are as charming; for
+instance, the view from Tavistock Square, of the tower of New St.
+Pancras Church, that tower imitated from the Athenian "Tower of the
+Winds," white against a blue sky; or, more mysterious, the great
+towers of St. Pancras Station, as they loom up blackly, like some
+mediaeval fortress, against a lurid twilight.
+
+Lamb's Conduit Street has many interesting curio-shops: Hindoo idols,
+yellow dragons, and the like, glare in quite human fashion at the
+passer-by from behind the grimy shop panes; and books and curios,
+combined, form the main stock-in-trade of the four quaint diverging
+alleys of the neighbouring Red Lion Square, already mentioned. It is a
+great mistake, however, to imagine that because a shop is dirty and
+tumble-down, its wares will necessarily be cheap. Though Bloomsbury
+shops may be slightly cheaper than those of Soho and Wardour Street,
+yet here, too, the engaging and generally picturesque old dealer has,
+in the case of old china, a keen eye to business; and as regards old
+books, that apparent disinclination to sell which is so general among
+second-hand booksellers, as to suggest that it is not without its
+magnetic charm for the buyer. Some old gentlemen seem, indeed, to
+utilize most of the available light of a London winter's day at the
+outside counters of these dusty second-hand book emporiums. So long do
+they browse, shivering and blue-nosed, in ragged "comforters" and very
+inadequate great-coats, that one is tempted to believe the story of
+the old scholar who read the whole of a long-sought classic in a
+winter's stolen hours at the counter. Seldom, in these days, do the
+"twopenny" or "fourpenny" boxes, that used to yield such prizes, now
+repay the book-hunter. Old school books, old guide books, and old
+sermons, "the snows of yester-year," now mainly fill them. And,
+indeed, with such a mine of fiction as Mudie's close by, where kind
+gentlemen recommend appropriate reading to timorous old ladies, or,
+better still, with such privileges as may be obtained in the
+neighbouring Reading Room of the British Museum, practically "for the
+mere asking," it is a strange taste to prefer to stand and shiver at a
+dingy book-counter. Once inside the sacred portals of the Reading Room
+(the stranger having satisfied the Cerberus at the wicket gate that he
+or she is "over twenty-one," a point on which there is not generally,
+as regards the Reading Room _clientele_, much doubt), a warm
+atmosphere, a comfortable seat, and a luxurious leather desk await the
+jaded wayfarer; with, further, polite attendants in the innermost
+circle to assist, if necessary, his researches; and, should he be
+hungry, a further possibility of a cheap lunch of sausage and mashed
+potato flanked by zoological and geological buns in the refreshment
+room, a locality now somewhat unkindly sandwiched between Greek heroes
+and Egyptian gods.
+
+[Illustration: _Mudie's._]
+
+But such mundane things as sausages are, primarily, far from the
+thoughts of the devotee of learning. Entering first the vast Dome of
+Knowledge,--where, as in St. Paul's, the blue mist and fog of London
+seem to hang, and where, underfoot, floor-cloth deadens all sound,--a
+certain solemnity impresses the visitor, a sense, almost, of being in
+another world. As, indeed, in some respects he is; for the denizens of
+the British Museum Reading Room are, mainly, a race apart and to
+themselves. They and their ways, "their tricks and their manners,"
+form an interesting study. Day after day, each one has his--or
+her--special place in the long diverging galleries that, like spokes
+of a wheel, emerge from the central sun of wisdom and electric light
+under the dome. Nobody, it is true, may reserve seats; yet often
+custom, seconded by public feeling (and that conservatism which is the
+birthright of every Londoner), reserves them none the less. The girls
+and women are largely of the art-serged, fuzzy-headed type,
+occasionally also dowdy and sallow, with that dust-ingrained
+complexion so peculiar to Bloomsbury; the men are generally, if young,
+badly tailored and long-haired, and, if old, irascible, snuffy and
+unwashed.
+
+Was it perchance of any of these that Thomas Carlyle was thinking when
+he wrote the following characteristic diatribe?--
+
+     "There are several persons in a state of imbecility who come
+     to read in the British Museum. I have been informed that
+     there are several in that state who are sent there by their
+     friends to pass away their time. I remember there was one
+     gentleman who used to blow his nose very loudly every
+     half-hour. I inquired who he was, and I was informed that he
+     was a mad person sent there by his friends; he made extracts
+     out of books, and puddled away his time there."
+
+Woe betide the novice whose evil star leads him to one of these
+gentlemen's special haunts! Of course there are a few smart visitors
+and a modicum of mere "fribblers" (some years ago, indeed, so many
+damsels repaired to the reading-room to skim recent novels, that a
+rule was passed forbidding the issue of any recent work of fiction),
+but the dowdy, plodding type forms the vast majority. In many cases
+the toilers are simply slaves sent by some absentee literary
+taskmaster to ferret out knotty points, or to look up references.
+Sometimes they are clergymen in search of detail for sermons;
+sometimes they are learned Casaubons or untiring Jellybys working on
+their own account.... A kind Government provides pens, ink, often
+tracing paper, and any amount of civility and trouble, free. It has
+been said unkindly by West-Enders, jealous of such liberality, that
+Bloomsbury alone should be taxed for the British Museum; such an
+injustice, however, has not, so far, been perpetrated!--
+
+That the British Museum is gradually absorbing all the houses near it,
+and enlarging its boundaries into a large square, is evident. The
+whole eastern side of Bedford Square, and part of the western side of
+Russell Square, will soon be amalgamated into the vast building. The
+little lions, those ornaments on the old outer railings, about whose
+disappearance such an outcry was raised some years back, have been
+adapted to the internal use of the Museum, and higher, stronger, more
+important railings substituted on the outside in their place. The
+large pediment of the portico, imitated--at how long an
+interval!--from the Greek model, is, like the statues in the squares,
+filled with nesting birds, and is generally also white with the
+pigeons' plumage. And, where this enormous building now stands, was
+originally Old Montague House, the "stately and ample ancient palace,"
+adorned by Verrio and built in the "French pavilion" way, when,
+practically, all the rest of Bloomsbury was open country. Where the
+big galleries now extend were corridors adorned by fresco paintings:
+and where the halls now given up to statues and treasures stand, were
+rooms full of light, music, and dancing.
+
+But I am wandering from the present. Yet, in the early winter twilight
+of the British Museum galleries, it is easy for vagrant fancies,
+unbidden, to arise. The vast dim galleries raise, indeed, ghosts and
+visions of a brilliant past, and confer almost humanity on their
+marble tenants, gigantic figures shining through the gloom. The Greek
+gods of the heroic age,--the creatures "moulded in colossal calm,"--we
+can almost imagine the minds who inspired, the workmen who wrought,
+the sculptors who fashioned, the temples that contained them. The
+stream of life still flows around the feet of these immortal ones, who
+in their calm smiling seem to scorn the poor passions of humanity; in
+their immortality, to rise above the feeble ebb and flow of human
+life. As Aurora they remain ever youthful, while we poor mortals, like
+Tithonus, adore their eternal youth and beauty, and ourselves grow
+old. Here, in the dim vestibule, is just such a Grecian Urn as that
+which Keats apostrophized, with its lovers whose undying youth and
+unsatisfied longing he envied.... "Ars longa, vita brevis," indeed! We
+go, but they shall endure,--to see "new men, new faces, other minds";
+to have, perchance, new labels written for them by future Dryasdusts;
+to be invested with fresh attributes by a newer school of ambitious
+critics. Many of them have seen cities rise and fall; they have
+survived ruin, siege, burial, neglect; and now at last they have come
+here to the same dead level of monotony:
+
+  "Deemed they of this, those worshippers,
+   When, in some mythic chain of verse
+   Which man shall not again rehearse,
+   The faces of thy ministers
+       Yearned pale with bitter ecstasy?
+
+  "Greece, Egypt, Rome--did any god,
+   Before whose feet men knelt unshod,
+   Deem that in this unblest abode
+   Another scarce more unknown god
+       Should house with him"--
+
+If these dead stones could feel, would they not lament their departed
+glory? The heroic figure of Mausolus, who, on the pinnacle of his
+temple, once drove his marble car, the cynosure of all eyes and the
+wonder of the world, outlined against the blue Aegean sky and sea,
+and the white-walled city; the gigantic bas-reliefs of the Parthenon,
+whose very existence here is the "shibboleth" of aesthetic criticism,
+that once adorned the ancient Athenian temple, brilliantly violet and
+golden against the faint blue line of the bay and hills of Salamis;
+the famous "Harpy Tomb," torn from its sunny Lycian height, and now
+glimmering dimly through London fog, guarded by a vigilant
+policeman,--what former beauties of surrounding nature do they not
+suggest or recall! We forget, in gazing, the nineteenth-century prose
+of Bloomsbury, the monotony of its gloomy streets; we forget that we
+ourselves are "the latest seed of time," the "last word" of the human
+race, dwelling, amid all the dull luxury of civilisation, in the
+greatest and richest city of the world. And, leaving the gallery by
+way of the vast and unique Assyrian collection of sculptures, passing
+through the two colossal human-headed bulls that guard its entrance,
+creatures whose excavation from the buried city of Nineveh forms one
+of the most romantic of modern discoveries; passing out into the misty
+sunshine and the flying doves before the pediment, we recall again
+Rossetti's wonderful lines, with their final suggestion of a future
+lost and rediscovered London--rediscovered under the dust and oblivion
+of future ages:
+
+  "And as I turned, my sense half shut
+   Still saw the crowds of kerb and rut
+   Go past as marshalled to the strut
+   Of ranks in gypsum quaintly cut.
+       It seemed in one same pageantry
+   They followed forms which had been erst;
+   To pass, till on my sight should burst
+   That future of the best or worst
+   When some may question which was first,
+       Of London or of Nineveh.
+
+  "For as that Bull-god once did stand
+   And watched the burial clouds of sand,
+   Till these at last without a hand
+   Rose o'er his eyes, another land,
+       And blinded him with destiny:--
+   So may he stand again; till now,
+   In ships of unknown sail and prow,
+   Some tribe of the Australian plough
+   Bear him afar--a relic now
+       Of London, not of Nineveh!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THEATRICAL AND FOREIGN LONDON
+
+                  --"All the world's a stage,
+  And all the men and women merely players...."--_Shakespeare._
+
+  "O gleaming lamps of London, that gem the City's crown,
+  What fortunes lie within you, O lights of London Town!"--
+                                    _G. R. Sims, Ballads of Babylon._
+
+
+As I was travelling, one day in winter, by the familiar and homely
+'bus whose "hue is green and gold"; not however, the "St. John's Wood"
+'bus, but that humbler and more business-like one which runs between
+Victoria and King's Cross, I observed, as we ascended Long Acre, a
+young woman get in at Bow Street, followed by a "lady friend" at Drury
+Lane. They were hot, untidy, and, as to their attire, muddy,
+be-bugled, and be-plushed; also, one of them carried a large and
+equally be-bugled baby. After their first salutations, they panted for
+a few minutes, out of breath; then:--
+
+"I've got it, duckie," cried the Bow Street charmer, a young woman
+with a big black fringe, and the owner of the overdressed and
+pasty-faced baby.
+
+"What have you got, dearie?" inquired her friend, who wore a dirty
+blouse that had once been yellow, under a heavy plush fur-trimmed cape
+(the month was November). The 'bus sat expectant.
+
+"'E's made me a thief!" (The 'bus, to a man, or rather, woman,
+started.) "I told 'im as I'd give 'im no peace till 'e did; I was
+bound to go back an' back, till 'e give me somethin'. An' now,
+sweetie, I'm one er the forty thieves, at a quid a week, and find
+nothin'. Ain't _that_ somethin'?"
+
+A light broke in upon the wondering 'bus, and all the auditors
+peacefully resumed their papers or their reflections. Of course, it
+was the Drury Lane pantomime! It was stupid of us not to have guessed
+it before, for the "dearie," "duckie" and "sweetie" ought to have
+suggested it at once! Also, the dresses of the two interlocutors,
+which, now that I looked at them again, seemed to have on the beholder
+that peculiar effect of combined smartness and disorder that, for some
+reason or the other, distinguishes the "pro;" the "pro,"--that is,--of
+the lower ranks of the theatrical profession.
+
+_The_ profession (as it is expressively and somewhat exclusively
+called by its devotees) embraces, of course, as many "sorts and
+conditions of men" as the equally large profession of newspaper
+writers. While it still remains a cruel fact that any one picked up
+"drunk and incapable" in a London street is usually described in next
+day's _Police News_ as either a journalist or an actress, there can
+yet be no doubt that the Bohemianism of the past, so far as the higher
+class of the theatrical world is concerned, is going out of fashion.
+With few exceptions, it is only among the lower ranks of "pros," or in
+music-halls, that it largely exists. These exceptions are, usually, to
+be found among those who have suddenly risen from obscurity on the
+theatrical firmament, to shine as bright "stars" for some brief
+period. Nowhere is success so sudden, so overwhelming, so blinding as
+it is in this vast city of London; and nowhere, alas! is that success
+so soon over, forgotten, eclipsed. The deity of one season is forsaken
+in the next; the Ruler-of-the-Universe must perforce return to his
+hovel, and, to say truth, he generally takes the change badly. London
+has a short memory. But the medal has its pleasanter reverse side.
+For, _per contra_, the young woman who has for years, maybe, blushed
+unseen in Camberwell, wasted her sweetness on seaside "fit-ups," and
+lorded it in third-rate provincial companies, may, suddenly, by some
+unexpected turn of Fortune's wheel, find herself elevated to the
+highest salaries in the profession. From a penurious lodging in the
+slums,--a daily "third return" from Gower Street,--she may rise,
+almost in the twinkling of an eye, to L40 a week, a flat in Mayfair,
+and a daintily-clipped poodle!
+
+It is, of course, the fame of such sudden successes that suffices to
+"turn the heads" of ignorant neophytes, who are but too apt to forget
+the common maxim, that "the many fail, the one succeeds." Thus it is
+that the stage has been for years flooded with girls of all classes,
+all eager for distinction, and all, alas! desiring "the palm without
+the dust!" Rising actresses have, as a rule, but one ambition--to act
+in London, to charm London audiences. Better, some think, a three-line
+part at the Lyceum than a "juvenile lead" at Leamington; better twenty
+weeks of the Criterion than a cycle of the Counties; better a
+curtain-raiser in the Haymarket than Shakespeare's Rosalind at
+Darlington or Preston. Hence the cruel and heart-rending
+"struggle-for-life" among young actresses in this big city of London;
+hence the weeks of slow starvation in Bloomsbury lodgings or Soho
+garrets, waiting for work that never comes. It is, indeed, for them,
+the "dust without the palm." Disappointed hopes, shattered ambitions,
+tragic suicides,--what stories could some of those Bloomsbury garrets
+tell!
+
+  "O cruel lamps of London, if tears your light could drown,
+   Your victims' eyes would weep them, O lights of London Town."
+
+Theatrical managers are callous; they can, indeed, hardly be
+otherwise, for the stage, like journalism, is scarcely "a charitable
+institution"; and the supply of stage applicants is far greater than
+the demand. When a new play is to be produced at a theatre, see how
+its waiting-rooms and grimy staircases are daily crowded with young
+men and women, all eager, all well-dressed, and all anxiously trying
+to conceal their often desperate need of money. For they must always
+be well-dressed; no self-respecting manager will ever think twice of a
+shabby or dowdy young woman; and dress is difficult to procure on a
+starvation diet.
+
+In certain quarters of the Strand and of Soho, "ladies" are to be
+found who act as superior "old clothes" dealers, buying, at cheap
+rates, the fine dresses of society butterflies from the maids of these
+latter, and retailing them again at enhanced prices to the poor
+neophytes in the theatrical profession. The custom, no doubt, is
+advantageous to all parties concerned; to the fine lady, who must not
+be seen more than three or four times in the same gown; to the maid,
+to whom the said gowns are "perquisites"; and, lastly, to the poor
+girl who must, _coute que coute_, procure her brocades, her gold lace
+and tinsel for her provincial tours. (London managers usually provide
+the ladies' dresses themselves; the men of the company, on the other
+hand, must provide their own.)
+
+Though actors and actresses live, nowadays, in all parts of London,
+yet, perhaps, they most incline to Bloomsbury and Soho, which classic
+region they have, indeed, haunted for centuries. In old Tudor and
+Shakespearean times Shoreditch and Bankside were the favoured spots,
+just as, later on, Covent Garden with its "Piazza," its Opera-houses,
+and its general air of Bohemianism, became the chosen locality. The
+histrionic art is no longer solely associated with Covent Garden and
+Bohemianism; indeed, the stars of the profession now belong, rather,
+to the smartest "set" in society; they often inhabit Mayfair,--and all
+doors, even those of royalty,--are open to them. But, just as the
+"rank and file" of the profession still haunt the classic
+neighbourhood of the "Garden," so the large bulk of actors and
+actresses are still to be found in the adjacent and convenient
+districts of Soho and Bloomsbury. In Bloomsbury, especially, are
+yearly rising innumerable red-brick flats, abodes largely tenanted by
+the theatrical profession. Their surroundings tell of them; "by their
+fruits ye shall know them." Hair-dressing shops, florists' shops,
+cheap jewellery shops, all these betray the tastes of the profession,
+and all these abound in the neighbourhood.
+
+The pantomimes, owing to the enormous number of people they employ, as
+well as to the great fillip they give to certain trades and
+occupations, play no inconsiderable part in the vast web of London
+life. That the Pantomime, as a yearly pageant, has so much increased
+in glory of recent times, is due mainly to the efforts of the late Sir
+Augustus Harris, who may, indeed, be said to have reached the
+high-water-mark of splendour in the Christmas show. Many hundreds of
+girls and women, often married and supporting families, are employed
+in the vast choruses of the Drury-Lane Theatre,--"the Lane" as it is
+called in local parlance; many hundreds of men, scene-shifters,
+carpenters, mechanics, and the like, are required for the production
+of its stupendous effects. Pantomime-land is, indeed, to those who
+know it, a country and a life in itself. From autumn to spring its
+rigors last; from October to March its workers labour. A few weeks
+before Christmas, the annual fever is at its height. Not only grown
+people, but children too, are pressed into the service; hence, no
+doubt, the pretty "steps" daily practised, throughout the year, by
+Cockney girl children before street-organs. Yet, the class whence
+these children are drawn is generally a more or less superior one;
+superior, at any rate, to that which one would naturally imagine.
+Once, in walking down Museum Street, I chanced to get just behind
+three nice little girls and their mother. It was a foggy, murky
+evening, and they were evidently taking the direct route for Drury
+Lane. They were pretty children, red-cloaked, rosy-cheeked, and neatly
+shod, and they tripped along demurely, holding each other's hands;
+their mother, neat also, if a little threadbare, walking behind them,
+keeping a careful and approving eye on her little flock.
+
+"Yes, they're all engaged for the winter at the 'Lane,'" she told me,
+in response to my sympathetic inquiry. "And it's a great help to me,
+it is, indeed; for my husband's ill, and he doesn't ever expect to get
+much better.... They're in the 'Flower Ballet'; the eldest, Lina,
+she's a Pansy; and the two younger ones, they're both Daisies....
+Quite a short scene; they're off in twenty minutes.... Interfere with
+their schooling? nothing to speak of, and they enjoy it. Yes, I take
+'em there, and fetch 'em back, twice every day; I can make shift to
+leave my husband for that time ... and I don't like 'em to run the
+streets alone.... But here we are...." a sudden lifting of the fog, a
+sudden glare of light, and then the Pansy, the Daisies, and their
+maternal attendant, were swallowed by the big jaws of the devouring
+"Lane."
+
+A lady who went on the pantomime stage, by special favour, for one
+night only, for the sake of the experience, has entertainingly related
+her adventures. Decked for the evening in a gay cavalier's hat, a
+velvet cloak, gorgeous trappings, and "tights," she got through her
+allotted part very creditably, though with no little nervousness. The
+tights specially distressed her, and she was hardly consoled by the
+wardrobe-mistress's kind assurance, that the cloak was "so very
+ample!" What struck her principally, in the whole thing, was the good
+humour and high spirits of the ladies of the chorus and ballet, who
+all of them joked and laughed incessantly, called each other by pet
+names, and seemed, like children, to know no care or trouble in the
+world. For the moment they enjoyed, or appeared to enjoy, the whole
+thing, and yet some of these very girls were, she knew, poor married
+women whose lives were filled with domestic cares. These regular
+winter engagements must, indeed, have been welcome, for their earnings
+averaged from 25_s._ to 30_s._ a week for six evening performances,
+with extra pay for the daily matinees.
+
+The pantomime is, however, hardly good to count on as a living, being,
+after all, but intermittent; the rank-and-file of the people engaged
+in the pantomime business have therefore often other avocations, and
+are not all full-blown "pros" with ambitions and yearnings. Not for
+such as these are the cruel disappointments, the insulting slights,
+the heart-rending procrastinations that break the spirit of so many
+young men and maidens in the "profession." If some of these could,
+indeed, know all that was in store for them, would they so gaily have
+embraced the theatrical career? It is a pity that they cannot be first
+disillusioned by a year's apprenticeship; yet even that might be of no
+avail, for when once they have experienced the magic glamour of the
+footlights, there is, indeed, little hope of return. Yet, to the
+outsider, who has never felt this glamour, there seems to be but
+little attraction about even a London stage rehearsal. The theatre is
+usually dark, and always dirty; the actors, especially those in
+secondary parts, seem but little impressed or interested; dressed,
+too, in their ordinary clothes, they look foolish, and their fine
+sentiments seem out of place. Even the protagonists are a trifle
+chilly: when Juliet or her next-of-kin unromantically munches
+sandwiches, seated on a dusty box in the wings; when Romeo, or his
+more modern prototype, uses language more convincing than elegant; and
+when both are addressed with almost painful familiarity by the dirty
+"call-boy," the glamour of the whole thing is apt, so far as the
+spectator is concerned, to be somewhat dispelled. Then, the manager is
+peremptory; the unhappy author quivers with emotion--and generally
+also with cold--in the stalls; people have a decided tendency to lose
+their tempers, and the onlooker is reduced to wonder dumbly,--whether
+things can possibly "pull themselves together" for the imminent "first
+night,"--and how in the world the dingy, draughty theatre can
+conceivably transform itself into the home of glory, wealth, and light
+that the favoured audience of the "premiere" know. These things are
+certainly an experience.
+
+[Illustration: _The "Gods."_]
+
+"Good society," says M. Taine (in his _Notes on England_), "does not
+go to the theatres, with the exception of the two opera houses, which
+are the exotic and hothouse plants of luxury, and in which the prices
+of admission are enormous, and evening dress is imperative. As to the
+others, the audience is recruited from among the lower middle class."
+This, although it contains a small element of truth, is, nevertheless,
+a manifest exaggeration. For smart society is a great supporter of the
+drama, and even royalty, whose attendance in the theatre is always
+announced beforehand by the supply of white silk programmes in the
+royal box, occasionally vouchsafes its presence. Especially is there
+always a great _furore_ over the procuring of "first night" seats at
+the best London theatres. So far, indeed, as the audience of the
+stalls is concerned, the "first-nighters" are, more or less, always
+the same people; influential magnates, editors, aristocratic "patrons
+of the drama," and a certain proportion of smart London people, those
+of whom it has come to be known that they make a point of attending
+every "first night" of any distinction. Sometimes invitations are
+issued; sometimes, it is a case of making early application. The
+_entree_ to certain first nights is a kind of social distinction.
+Often a supper party is given after the performance, on the cleared
+stage; at such gatherings a spirit of geniality prevails, and smart
+society does obeisance generally to the bright particular stars of the
+drama. With the more plebeian pit and gallery it is otherwise. These
+unreservedly express their feelings, and, after first representations,
+voice the sentiments of the multitude. These, if the curtain be at all
+belated in rising, raise the house by din and hubbub; the noise that
+they make, indeed, is apt to scare the uninitiated; it resembles a
+revolution on a small scale. The pit and gallery are very intent on
+getting their money's worth; for they always pay for their seats, and
+pay, not only in coin of the realm, but in sad and weary hours of
+waiting in the cold, drizzled street. Who has not noticed, on days of
+bright spring weather and dreary autumn alike, a long crowd of patient
+men and women waiting uncomplainingly in a long file till the theatre
+doors should open and admit them? At the Lyceum, the file,--and this
+not only on first nights,--extends far round the corner into the
+Strand. At the Haymarket Theatre, or the newer Her Majesty's,--it
+reaches far up towards Piccadilly Circus. Sometimes a few among the
+patient crowd have provided themselves with campstools; sometimes,
+too, kindly managers or thoughtful ladies like Miss Ellen Terry send
+out five o'clock tea to the suffering humanity nearest to the theatre
+doors; and, certainly, the "cup that cheers" must prove exceptionally
+cheering when one has waited for it in the chilly street ever since 9
+A.M.! For very important first-night performances, nine, or at latest
+10 A.M. is essential if the playgoer would make at all sure of the
+front row. It is a long day's picnic; yet the crowd remains ever
+amiable and stoical. One may, indeed, learn not a little of philosophy
+and bonhomie from that motley crew, who,--whether they be ladies from
+the suburbs, calmly eating sandwiches,--superior artisans taking "a
+day off,"--city clerks,--shop-girls,--or dressmakers' apprentices come
+to study the prevailing modes,--are all uniformly cheerful. From hour
+to hour homely jest and rough witticism enliven the day's tedium, and
+testify to the unfailing good temper and love of fair play of London
+crowds.
+
+The pit is a sacred institution of London. We may, if we choose,
+sympathise with the long hours of waiting pit-door crowds, but woe
+betide him who would thoughtlessly attempt to do away with the system.
+One manager, indeed, did recently attempt this; but a riot nearly
+supervening, he had perforce to take refuge in a judicious compromise.
+The Londoner is ever conservative in his tastes as well as in his
+politics. Ladies are allowed to wear their headgear in the pit; and
+the large erections they sometimes don testify more to their vanity
+than to their philanthropy. One sometimes hears a faint protest
+against such exaggerated types of millinery: "I 'ope I sha'n't 'ave to
+sit be'ind that 'at," a depressed pittite has been heard to murmur
+when entering the theatre just after a "lydy" with one of these
+alarming concoctions.
+
+Where are the tastes of "the people" with regard to plays? It is
+difficult to generalize. The gallery love melodrama; they also like a
+good deal of moral sentiment, which they will often loudly
+approve;--to the extent, sometimes, of even offering advice on the
+situation to the actors. This is why the _Message from Mars_, a
+morality taken straight from Dickens, went so directly home to "the
+great heart of the British people." M. Taine complains that the
+English have no national comedy; that all their comedies are adapted
+from the French; "is it," he asks, "because of English reserve?" But,
+though the pit and gallery are generally serious, they are yet not
+serious enough for Ibsen; "I consider that there piece blasphemious,"
+a disgusted artisan once said to me of the _Master-Builder_; "that
+'ere shillin' I spent on it was clean thrown away; I went out arter
+the fust act." The majority of young men and maidens love comic opera,
+which seems, indeed, to be one of the paying "lines" in the London of
+to-day. Music-halls flourish; it is an eloquent sign of the times that
+the large and ornate "Palace Theatre,"--opened, with such a flourish
+of trumpets, a few years ago as the "New English Opera House," and
+known far and wide by its flashes of brilliant search-light,--should
+now have descended to a "variety" show. The great middle-class
+supports Shakespeare and the "legitimate" drama; shop-girls, and
+dressmakers' apprentices, like the "society" plays of the St. James's
+and kindred theatres, because they offer some opportunity for seeing
+the ways of that "high-life" from which they are themselves excluded.
+Millinery and costume are most important factors in the modern
+theatre; I know of many well-to-do girls who never think of buying
+their season's hats and gowns till they have first seen them on Mrs.
+Patrick Campbell, Mrs. Tree, or Miss Winifred Emery. And _The Price of
+Peace_, a feeble, but immensely successful Drury Lane melodrama, owed
+its success to the fact that it brought before the eyes of the
+proletariat, in a variety of well-constructed scenes, all the select
+haunts and fashions of the great world: Tea on the Terrace; a Wedding
+in Westminster Abbey; a Debate in the House of Commons; a Ball in
+Park-Lane, &c., &c. Such pieces are, of course, not the only
+favourites; good comedies are very popular, and English people,
+despite M. Taine, still like to laugh. Yet, take it all round, "Good
+Society," with, preferably, a judicious admixture of melodrama and
+sentiment, is the really paying thing with the pit and gallery.
+
+If the murky London daylight in the theatre shows a mournful change
+from its nocturnal glories, even sadder is the contrast between the
+splendid entrance hall, or lobby, blazing with welcome lights, and the
+dark, grimy, and generally wretched "stage-door," which opens, mostly,
+into some gloomy back-street, and seems, to the uninitiated at least,
+to have no connection at all with the theatre. Here, the manners of
+the stage acolytes are altogether to match with the outward show, and
+there would appear to exist some traditional and transmitted dislike
+to soap-and-water. Strange stories some of these stage doors could
+tell! The stage door of the "Adelphi," for instance, where poor
+William Terriss was brutally murdered by the criminal lunatic whom he
+had befriended,--does it not still give to its old locality a
+suggestion of blood and tears? Are not the vicissitudes, too, of
+theatres as striking and as dramatic in their way as those of other
+historic houses? Now they are great and well-known; then disaster
+overtakes them, and their very names, for years, are forgotten,--till
+at last they go the way of old bricks and mortar. In their final dirt
+and disgrace they hardly recall the scenes of their former triumphs.
+One might, indeed, become superstitious when one sees how Fortune
+seems to befriend certain theatres, and as persistently to frown on
+others. As for some old playhouses,--their day once over, their place
+knows them no more.... The old Prince of Wales's Theatre, for
+instance, in Tottenham Street, so famous in the early triumphs of the
+Bancrofts and Kendals,--who recalls it in its present ruin and
+discomfiture? The Salvation Army has lately taken pity on it; but
+apparently its hour has now come, and with its adjacent
+tenement-houses in Pitt Street, where its green-rooms were, it lies at
+the mercy of fate and the hammer.
+
+The London theatres are nearly all of them in crowded situations, and
+often so devious and unexpected are the ways by which they are reached
+that if the city were at some distant age dug out from oblivion like
+that of Pompeii, the results might be even more puzzling to the
+antiquary. The stalls, for instance, of the Criterion Theatre are deep
+underground, reached by myriad carpeted stairs; even the upper circles
+are well below the street. And what a strange and indecipherable
+"crypto-porticus" would the "Twopenny Tube" prove to some future
+Middleton of the ages? In central parts, London, indeed, seems a city
+built in several superimposed layers: layers, too, not successive, but
+coeval.
+
+The life of London, always intense, burns at its highest pressure in
+and near Piccadilly Circus, and a restless activity reigns here all
+through the long hours of day and night. For this is, so to speak, one
+of the main doorways of the immense ant-heap; like ants, too, people
+seem to swarm incessantly, to go and come, in inconsequent but
+feverishly active sequence. Here is a blaze of light, a perpetual
+throng of "London's gondola," the hansom-cab, a confused medley of
+many sounds, that ceases not, but fades only after midnight; when the
+"heart of London," that never sleeps, subsides in the early hours of
+the morning into a dulled and general hum.
+
+At Piccadilly, the foreign element from Leicester Square and Soho
+meets the native one. The French, Italian, and German tongues are,
+indeed, frequently heard all over London; but in the neighbourhood of
+Leicester Square, the visitor really might, especially on a sunny
+fogless day, imagine himself in Paris or Berlin. The shops have
+foreign names: "Blanchisserie Fine" alternates with "Deutsche
+Droguenhandlung" or "Vino Scelto"; French waiters and Italian cooks
+stand, white-capped and white-aproned, smilingly at the doors of their
+respective restaurants; cheap and fair hostelries for wandering
+foreigners, with beds as low in price as two shillings per night, rise
+towering on every side. It is said that the French colony, in
+particular, of Leicester Square and Soho owes its origin to the early
+French refugees who, at various stormy periods, have sought shelter
+here from the internal dissensions of their own country. It has been
+said that, as far north as Seven Dials, the organ-grinders still find
+the "Marseillaise" the most lucrative tune to play; and this may well
+be so, though I myself have generally found, at least among the rising
+generation, the latest music-hall song or dance to be in the
+ascendant. There is another subject I would fain touch on here, at the
+risk even of irrelevance; it refers to the Soho style of _coiffure_.
+That there is a special fashion in ladies' hair-dressing peculiar to
+every district in London, is a fact which every passing visitor must
+soon recognize; thus, while in Clerkenwell model-lodging-houses it is
+generally (except for one short hour or two on Sundays),--Hinde's
+curlers,--in Seven Dials it is mostly of the "touzled" order, and in
+the West End of the classic "New Greek style." Here, in Leicester
+Square, it has a partly-French, partly-theatrical air, being generally
+parted in the middle, and brought, in smooth, dark, exaggerated Early
+Victorian loops, well over the ears. But details are more important
+than people imagine. "Nothing," says M. Gabriel Mourey, "so reveals a
+woman's psychology as her way of doing her hair." And the observant
+Frenchman goes on to draw certain quaint inferences from the English
+girl's style of _coiffure_, and her neatly braided tresses, careless
+of such aids to beauty as stray curls or "meches folles;" a severe
+style that, according to this writer, "forms a rude contrast to the
+spiritual charm of her face, her Burne-Jonesian refinement of
+feature." ... As to the manner of hair-dressing betraying the
+personality, "nothing," he adds paradoxically, "could be more true of
+the typical Englishwoman, who never of her own free will, allows you
+to see a fraction of her real self, but draws into her shell of
+reserve with the same jealous reclusiveness that makes her bind her
+hair in such dull, tight, regular uniformity."
+
+M. Mourey is certainly more polite to us than was M. Taine, who said
+unkindly that Englishwomen had big feet, as large as those of
+watermen, "and gait and boots in keeping"; also, that "it is
+impossible to train one's self to endure their long projecting
+teeth;" the effect, he supposes, of a carnivorous diet! "The point of
+view," again, not merely Anglophobia! The red-whiskered Englishman
+dressed in blatant checks;--his long-toothed gaunt spouse,--how long
+will these ridiculous fictions haunt the French mind? But even M.
+Taine would have been happy in Soho. Here, even the Englishwoman is
+less aggressively English; indeed, she blends, in indescribable
+medley, the qualities both of the _Belle of New York_ and of the
+Parisian boulevards! Soho, however, is remarkable for other things
+than mere hairdressing. For the gastronomic talent that the French so
+naturally possess causes this whole district, including the
+neighbouring Covent Garden, to be noted, not only for many
+second-class "eating-houses," but also for good and moderately priced
+places to dine. The vast reform in this respect that has taken place
+of late years all over London probably owes not a little to these
+early pioneers in the art.
+
+With the multiplication of cheap and good restaurants has grown in
+equal ratio the importation of Swiss and Italian waiters. These, every
+year, emigrate from their romantic valleys to our foggy shores, and
+work out their three, four, or five years in an alien land, partly for
+the sake of better wages, partly for that of learning the English
+language--an accomplishment without which no foreign waiter is now
+considered fully equipped. With unsparing thrift, they save the
+greater part of their wages; and they acquire the language as quickly
+as they can; with these two possessions they return to their own
+country, where they may either at once demand a higher salary,--or, if
+already well-to-do, buy a small holding and "settle down." When they
+first arrive in London, they are generally very young men, who come in
+faith and hope to the rumoured "golden land" of England, leaving their
+lovely native valley and their romantic homesteads with no less
+courage and resolution than, in mediaeval times, would have drawn them
+forth, at a mercenary's wage, to the bloody field of war. The late Mr.
+J. A. Symonds, whose sympathies with, and knowledge of, the
+Swiss-Italian waiter are well known, has, he tells us, often wondered
+why the Alpine peasant goes through such cruel and comfortless
+expatriation. "The answer," he says, "is very simple:
+
+     "He wants to make money, and has the most resolute
+     intention, after making it, to settle down at home and live
+     the pleasant life of his forefathers in the mountains. In
+     olden days he would have fought on any and every battlefield
+     of Europe to get cash. But European history has turned over
+     a new leaf. 'Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis,' and
+     the Swiss make more by _Fremdenindustrie_ than they could do
+     by foreign military service in this age."
+
+Landing in London with a small and hardly-saved pittance in their
+pockets, these lads usually live, as cheaply as may be, in and about
+Soho and Covent Garden, until such time as they can obtain employment.
+Switzerland, and especially Canton Ticino, furnishes a large part of
+the London waiters; yet all Italy, too, contributes her share. Even
+from one of the lonely hill-towns of the Apennines, three elegant
+youths, faultlessly attired,--servants of the inn, but whom I had
+imagined from their superior manners to be resident aristocrats,--once
+begged me to take them into my service, as footmen, cooks,
+knife-and-boot-boys, anything; "anything, madame, just to get a
+footing in England." Though the desirability of these as servants in
+private houses might, perhaps, be doubtful,--yet it is certain that in
+restaurants or hotels,--in quickness and in reliability,--the Swiss or
+Italian waiter far excels the English one. He rarely loses his temper.
+I have seen one waiting, single-handed, upon at least fifty impatient
+diners, and contenting every one. We can teach them very little. Yet
+they like to learn of us all they can. "I have learned a few things in
+England," the son and waiter in a little Swiss inn once said to me; a
+pleasant, rosy-cheeked youth, just over twenty, recently returned from
+a two years' service in London to the parental hostelry in a lonely,
+narrow valley. "Yes, I have learned something very fine." And he drew
+my attention to the quaint white-washed walls of the inn, made hideous
+by Japanese fans and cheap paper rosettes, &c.
+
+"You are English?" he went on, with a pleased smile: "ah, then, you
+know my place in London, Scott's?"
+
+(By "Scott's," he designated, as it turned out, the oyster-bar at the
+top of the Haymarket, which locality he apparently considered to
+represent the sum and total of "smart" London life.)
+
+"Ah, I shall do this place up in fine style," he said, looking
+contemptuously round him at the modest but picturesque paternal inn.
+"Why, you will hardly know it again next year! I shall have the
+salle-a-manger pypered"--(he had learned the cockney dialect well),
+"pypered with bunches of fruit, flowers, monkeys--all in the English
+manner--ah! you will see! I shall wake them all up!"
+
+And the "salle-a-manger," with its old black-panelled walls, was so
+much prettier as it was!
+
+To be a waiter, however, even an "oyster-bar" waiter, is a superior
+position to that of a mere porter; and to be porters, "boots," hotel
+drudges of any and every description, "just to get a footing," is the
+primary aim of these sturdy aliens. Not only money and future
+advantage, but also what is known as the "Wanderlust," is, perhaps,
+yet another factor in the impulse that drives them from their homes.
+However this may be, rarely do they stay in the land of their bondage
+beyond the allotted time; still more rarely do they "colonize" in our
+sense of the word; but have ever before them, through all their
+struggles and hardships, the thought of the peaceful mountain home and
+honest competency that shall be theirs in middle age.... Poor lads!
+when I see you, worn and shabby, waiting, perhaps, in that long,
+pitiful black line of seedy applicants, now hopeful, now despairing of
+engagement, outside the big London restaurants, I confess to a
+tightness in my throat, thinking how, like Calverley's little Savoyard
+of Hatton Garden:
+
+  "Far from England, in the sunny
+   South, where Anio leaps in foam,
+   Thou wast bred, till lack of money
+   Drew thee from thy vine-clad home."
+
+Surely the traveller who returns, yearly, from his pleasant tour in
+Alpine valleys, might always, here in foggy London, yield to the
+motive that prompts him, after a well-served dinner, to "give to the
+poor devil" an extra sixpence, reflecting, meanwhile, that he is
+thereby hastening the happy, far-off time when that "poor devil,"
+enriched by years of painful toil and honest endeavour, may return to
+his valley, his home, his boyhood's love perhaps, and his own little
+patch of tillage.
+
+The great monument of the "Fremden-Industrie" in London, as well as
+the focus and centre of the Swiss-Italian immigrants, is, of course,
+the establishment known as "Gatti's." Everyone knows the "Adelaide
+Gallery," and the palatial, velvet-cushioned restaurant that fronts
+the Strand. What were the beginnings of this great business? The
+brothers Agostino and Stefano Gatti, chocolate-makers, ice-cream
+princes, theatrical managers,--who has not heard of them from time
+immemorial?--has not their fame, in melodrama no less than in
+meringues, been almost a household word? In 1868, already they were
+naturalized as Englishmen; yet Mr. Agostino Gatti, native of Ticino,
+was none the less elected as a representative to the supreme Swiss
+Federal Assembly. The two brothers began modestly, in a small way;
+they managed everything themselves; standing, daily, shirt-sleeved, at
+their desk at receipt of custom, they were familiar figures of the
+past. They succeeded on the principle of Dickens's honest grocer, Mr.
+Barton, who made it his boast that "he was never above his business,
+and he hoped his business would never be above him!" The "Maison
+Gatti," the brothers' private house, stands in dignified Bedford
+Square; and the firm of Gatti, the heads of which are still to be seen
+in their shops, has doubtless amassed a large fortune. That fortune
+was well deserved; for the Gattis were among the pioneers in the
+reforming of restaurants.
+
+     "There is no more curious sight in London," writes the
+     chronicler of the Gattis, "than the Adelaide Gallery between
+     five and seven o'clock in the evening. From the door which
+     opens into the street which runs by the graveyard of St.
+     Martin's Church, to the handsome frontage which opens into
+     the Strand, every table is occupied by a remarkable
+     assemblage of men, women, and children. The husband brings
+     his wife, the mother brings her children, the lover brings
+     his sweetheart, and the Church, the stage, the press--each
+     sends its representatives. Tragedies and comedies have been
+     enacted over those marble-topped tables which, if they were
+     related, would make the fortune of a thousand playwrights."
+
+[Illustration: _Ice-cream Barrow._]
+
+The ice-cream trade, however, with which the brothers Gatti largely
+identified themselves, is carried on, on inferior lines, to-day in
+Hatton Garden, Little Saffron Hill, and Clerkenwell. Here is the
+poorer Italian colony; organ-grinders, ice-cream-barrow-men,
+"hokey-pokey" sellers, and their like. Here, among a population of
+more or less honest toilers, congregate the waifs and strays of
+civilisation, people who, owing perhaps to their peripatetic and
+uncertain trade, could hardly help being loafers, even were they not
+mainly Neapolitans to boot: a difficult word, which has been corrupted
+by the low English in the vicinity, into first "Nappleton" and then
+simply "Appleton." City improvements have, however, ousted the chief
+Neapolitan colony from Great and Little Saffron Hills; and Eyre Street
+Hill, with its adjacent slums and alleys, is now their peculiar haunt.
+In the worst byways, and after dark, this is said to be a dangerous
+quarter to visit, Neapolitans being always proverbially ready with the
+knife.... Nevertheless, on fine spring days, it is not unpicturesque;
+the gay dresses of the women, the groups of handsome, dark-eyed
+youths, and the merry, brightly-clad children, lending almost an
+Italian charm to the scene. And the charming, curly-haired boys--the
+pretty and pathetic Savoyard, with his beloved monkey in a red
+coat--who does not know them? The men have other resources, as well as
+ice-creams and street-organs. Some of them hire themselves out as
+artists'-models to the big studios, a business which is well paid, and
+to which the picturesque Italian beauty well lends itself. Some, more
+skilled, are perhaps modellers of stucco images, which are hawked
+about the streets by others; some are knife-grinders, who go about
+with a wheel, and make, it is said, the best earnings of all. In the
+summer these poor exotics from the land of the sun manage to live, no
+doubt, pretty tolerably; in the winter, surely not even the
+chestnut-roasting apparatus that they hawk from street to street can
+suffice to keep them warm! They generally live in human rabbit
+warrens, under the patronage of a "padrone," a sort of modified and
+amiable slave-dealer, who imports them from their native land, and
+pockets, as price, a share of their earnings. They live poorly and
+frugally: and those of us who know the long street of Portici, will
+not, in the fouler air of London, expect much from their homes in the
+way of cleanliness. Yet the Italian women who, with their "men" and
+their babies, accompany the street organs, are generally trim and
+smiling, and, so far as foot-gear and general neatness of appearance
+is concerned--are immeasurably the superiors of their English
+slum-sisters.
+
+[Illustration: _The Organ-grinder._]
+
+The Italian woman seems, indeed,--in London, at any rate,--always
+vastly superior to the Italian man. She is religious; she goes, as a
+rule, regularly to her "Chiesa Cattolica." She is cleaner, smarter,
+pleasanter; she does most of the work; she often does the principal
+part of the organ-pushing--while her loafing partner slouches along by
+her side, yearning, doubtless, for his "polenta" and his midday
+siesta. She helps--indeed, her entire family, down to the babies,
+help--in the matutinal manufacture of the mysterious "hokey-pokey,"
+whence, in the early morning hours, her "court" is a perfect babel of
+chatter and noise, and Eyre Street Hill becomes a strange sight for
+the inexperienced Londoner. Not only Neapolitans, but Sicilians,
+Tuscans, Venetians, are represented; indeed, the dialects and the
+slang used are so unlike, that the different circles of this Italian
+colony often themselves fail to understand one another. In the
+evenings, and generally on their doorsteps, the men play "mora," and
+gamble; while the women, for their part, patch clothes, chatter, and
+gesticulate in true native fashion. Later, the lord of creation,
+leaving his lady at home, goes off to the "Club Vesuvio" or to the
+"Club Garibaldi," where dancing goes on to a tune struck up by a
+fiddler, and the lowest type of London girls, befeathered, shawled,
+and dishevelled in true East-End fashion, dance with dirty and
+brigand-like Italian men. It is a strange life, and stranger still is
+the manner in which various types and nationalities have thus for
+generations "squatted down" in special districts of the metropolis,
+and filled them with their traditions, their atmosphere, their
+personality.
+
+Many other colonies are to be seen in London; it is the most polyglot
+of cities. For those interested in such matters, nothing would give a
+better idea of the many-sided life of the metropolis than to take a
+long Sunday walk through its various districts. To quote the words of
+a recent writer:
+
+     "Sunday is, above all days, the day for such excursions,
+     because there are none of the distractions of every-day
+     life, or the bustle of business affairs. It is on Sunday you
+     can see how polyglot London is, how the gregarious
+     foreigners, herding together, occupy whole districts, living
+     their own life, following the manners and customs of their
+     own country, enjoying their own forms of religion,
+     amusement, and business."
+
+The Yiddish colony of Whitechapel, the Jewish Ghetto; the Asiatic
+colony in Poplar and the Dock neighbourhood generally; these and
+others display all the picturesqueness, the local colour, the
+kaleidoscopic life that many travellers go to distant lands to
+experience. In London, all peoples, and all classes, have their
+traditional strongholds, which are known and labelled. Thus,
+Bayswater, where the "high life" among the Asiatic colonists makes its
+home, is generally spoken of by foreigners as "Asia Minor." Here live
+the rich and cultured Orientals, those who have come over for
+pleasure, business, trade, or education; as for their poorer brethren,
+they live out in Poplar, Shadwell, or anywhere in the near vicinity of
+the East India Docks.
+
+These Asiatics of the East End are a strange and motley crew; brought
+in by every steamer, every heavily-cargoed ship from the East, every
+trader "dropping down with costly bales." On the largest ships, say
+those of the P. and O. Company, vessels of some 7,000 tons, there will
+be perhaps some 120 Orientals on board, and, with such contingents
+continually arriving, there is, naturally, in the East End, a large
+foreign, though ever-shifting, population. Curious are the corruptions
+of Indian words one hears, and strange indeed are the sights and
+sounds among Malays, Chinese, and Indians. The famous opium dens of
+the East End, turned to such dramatic account not only in Dickens's
+_Edwin Drood_, but also, at a later day, in the _Sherlock Holmes_
+sequence of stories, are now much restricted in their horrors by
+police supervision. They used to be devils' haunts, famed for robbery
+and vice--traps set to catch the unwary Asiatic; but missionary work,
+combined with the clearances made by the East London Railway, has
+effected great improvement in the opium den of to-day. In the words of
+the writer before-mentioned:
+
+     "It looks like a private house, and no noise is permitted,
+     for it is necessary to keep it as private as possible to
+     prevent police interference. For they are invariably
+     gambling dens also, and the Asiatic who goes to gamble still
+     burns his joss-stick before the idol set up inside, in order
+     to propitiate his deity and get good luck. Though repellant
+     in appearance, there is a certain picturesqueness about the
+     interior of these places. The shrine stands just inside the
+     door, and there is a pungent odour from the ever-burning
+     incense, while vases of artificial flowers, mingling among
+     such queer votive offerings as biscuits and cups of tea,
+     give it a strange appearance. The Canton matting, which is
+     largely used in the rooms, gives a little local colour, and
+     the _personnel_ of the place is of a decided polyglot order.
+     You may possibly see one or two men lying about sleeping off
+     the results of their opium debauch: but gambling seems to be
+     the main feature."
+
+Nevertheless, even in these "reformed" dens, the home-coming sailor,
+or the imprudent Lascar, may find himself tempted to his undoing and
+"cleaned out" of all his hard-won earnings. Or he may possibly be
+"knifed," and, if the criminal escape, in this region of obscure and
+unknown "byways," even the experienced police may be hard set to find
+him. It is, indeed, a true "Vanity Fair," this East End of London, for
+poor Christian and Faithful, fresh from the sea and all its dangers.
+
+The Yiddish colony is also a city by itself. The Jews who foregather
+in Whitechapel are mostly of Polish, Russian, or German extraction,
+and their talk, to unused ears, sounds like a strange German lingo,
+unpleasantly whined through the nose. Indeed, it closely resembles
+German; the word "Yiddish" itself being but a corruption of the German
+"Juedisch," or Jewish. These people, whose "interpreters" figure
+largely at nearly every police-court brawl in Whitechapel, Shoreditch,
+and Spitalfields, may be said to be a law and a dispensation to
+themselves. They crowd, in their numbers, into dirty tenement houses,
+in yet dirtier streets; streets in which they barter, buy and sell
+with all the instinct and all the indomitable energy of their race.
+Here are the tailors' sweating dens, so often deplored by
+philanthropic "commissions"; here human toil is reduced, for the
+benefit of the "middleman," to its lowest possible price. The
+so-called "Jewish slave-market," to the existence of which attention
+has been called in the Press, is a strange and unpleasing custom. Here
+the Jewish "slave-owner" is, more or less, in the place of the Italian
+"padrone" already referred to, in that he imports human material, and
+"farms out" human labour:
+
+     "Any one who devotes a Sunday or two to visiting the
+     open-air markets in the Jewish quarter, will have noticed on
+     the fringe of the markets groups of men, sometimes with
+     women and children. If you are under the convoy of a Jewish
+     acquaintance who 'knows the ropes,' he will tell you that it
+     is a 'hiring fair.' But it has a suspiciously close
+     approximation to a slave market."
+
+Leases of human labour, sold, at starvation wages for the victims, to
+the highest bidder, are not unnatural to a slum Yiddish population
+whose whole life is spent in barter. The Jewish colony in the East End
+now numbers some 35,000 souls:
+
+     "Only recently Lord Rothschild described it as a 'new
+     Poland,' and said that it was the business of the nation
+     'first to humanise it and then Anglicise it.' It certainly
+     wants humanising."
+
+The cosmopolitanism of London tends to draw to it the sweepings, as
+well as the choice spirits,--the worst, as well as the best,--of all
+other nations and climes. "Hell is a city much like London," said the
+poet Shelley; and he spoke truth. Views, religious and otherwise,
+differ largely as to what Hell may be; one opinion, however, may be
+safely hazarded; that it will at any rate be cosmopolitan.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Sale at Christie's._]
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+LONDON SHOPS AND MARKETS
+
+  "The busy Mart of London."
+
+  "Gay shops, stately palaces, bustle and breeze,
+  The whirring of wheels, and the murmur of trees;
+  By night or by day, whether noisy or stilly,
+  Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly."--
+                         _Locker-Lampson, London Lyrics._
+
+
+I am confident that if a million of women of all classes could by any
+possibility be placed in a Palace of Truth, and interrogated straitly
+as to what they liked best in all London, the vast majority of them
+would answer, "The Shops." Indeed, you may easily, and without any
+undue inquisitiveness, find this out for yourself by simply taking
+(in May for choice) a morning or afternoon walk down Oxford Street or
+Regent Street. Every shop of note will have its quota of would-be
+buyers, trembling on the brink of irrevocable purchase: its treble,
+nay, quadruple row of admiring females, who appear to find this by far
+the most attractive mode of getting through the day. I would go
+further, and say that as regards the more persevering among them, it
+is difficult to imagine that they ever have any other occupation at
+all.
+
+The shops of London have wonderfully improved in quite recent years;
+not perhaps, so much in actual quality, as in arrangement and taste.
+Labels with "dropsical figures" of shillings and perfectly invisible
+pence have, as in Dickens's time, still their charm for us; but other
+things have changed. Everything could, to those who "knew," always be
+bought best in London; but everything was not always displayed to the
+best advantage. To dress a shop-front well was in old days hardly
+considered a British trait. But "nous avons change tout cela." Now,
+even the Paris boulevard, that Paradise of good Americans, has, except
+perhaps in the matter of trees and wide streets, little to teach us.
+"The wealth of Ormus and of Ind" that the shops of Regent Street and
+Bond Street display, their gold embroideries and wonderfully woven
+silks, tending to make a kleptomaniac out of the very elect,--these it
+would be hard indeed to beat. Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed
+like one of these.
+
+Even the critical American cousin is now beginning to forsake Paris,
+and to find out the real superiority of London shops. See how he--she,
+I mean--helps, in her numbers, to swell the shop-gazing crowds in
+Oxford Circus. Tramping from Bloomsbury boarding-houses,--or, more
+aristocratic, from Northumberland Avenue hotels,--the Americans have
+discovered, and are in a fair way to dominate, London; the London,
+that is, of July and August.
+
+"The English," said a celebrated Frenchman once unkindly, "are a
+nation of shopkeepers." However that may be, it is certain that we are
+nothing if not business-like. Evidently, the love of bargaining is
+inherent in the soul of the average British female who comes up from
+the suburbs for a day's shopping. She has a long, neatly-written list
+of her wants and necessities, generally pinned to some part of her
+person, a list with startling variations of subject, thus: "Baby's
+food-warmer, Tom's cricket-bat, lay-figure for Sylvia, beetle-trap for
+the kitchen, Effie's long Suede gloves, registry office for new cook,
+dentist, evening wrap, chiffon boa, something neat in the blouse line
+for Mamie, Aunt Maria's birthday." Poor woman! That "something neat in
+the blouse line" takes her nearly forty minutes in the finding; and
+"Aunt Maria's birthday" walks sadly into the hour for lunch, already
+attenuated. Several shops, alas! have been ransacked vainly, and the
+horrid "Sign 'ere, Miss!" that so cruelly stigmatizes, in certain
+cheap shops, the recalcitrant buyer, has more than once mortified the
+poor lady's sensitive ears. "Mamie," who is assisting at the
+martyrdom, gets quite cross over Aunt Maria; she succeeds, however, in
+detaching herself from her inconvenient parent, and appears, for her
+part, to be preferring the claims of a protege of her own, a personage
+who is very particular, apparently, about his special brand of ties.
+Finally, Aunt Maria's natal day is checked off by the purchase of an
+aggressive china pug, large as life, with staring eyes, which, for
+some occult reason, is supposed to be "the very thing" for that lady.
+
+What are the special qualities that constitute "a good shopper"? They
+would appear to be as follows: endurance, patience, strength,
+coolness, self-control, amiability, mental arithmetic, and, lastly, an
+eye to a bargain. All these cardinal virtues are, for the average
+shopper, considered as generally necessary to salvation: but yet there
+are other qualifications. For instance, the intense delight that most
+women (and a few men) feel in obtaining an article at 1_s._
+11-3/4_d._, that has once been marked with the magic 3_s._ 6-1/2_d._,
+is of distinct value in this connection. How many women have
+delightedly bought a thing that is not of the slightest value to
+themselves or to any one else, simply because it is thus reduced in
+price! Hence the supreme advantage of sales--but that is another
+story.
+
+Caveat Emptor! It is the object of the seller merely to sell; and in
+his behalf it may be urged, that there is no gauging the absurd
+vagaries of the public taste. I may add, with reference to "Aunt
+Maria's" china pug, that some shops (arguing, no doubt, from the oddly
+imitative ways of shoppers and their docile, sheep-like way of
+following one another's lead), have taken to the inauguration of
+strange fashions. Lately a well-known West End emporium started that
+blue cat with pink eyes, wearing a yellow riband, tied in an enormous
+bow round its neck. It was an aesthetic, Burne-Jonesian cat; indeed, it
+was hardly like a cat at all; but, nevertheless, it sat in rows in
+that shop-window, and the line (I believe such things are called
+"lines") "took," and forthwith no home was complete without a cat.
+Then some enterprising Tottenham Court Road firm evolved the idea that
+a life-sized negro, dressed in the latest fashion, and sprawling in a
+cane chair with a cigarette, was the "very thing" for the vestibule.
+Personally, I should have preferred the chair empty, so that one could
+have sat in it one's self; the negro, however, enjoyed wide
+popularity. Then a little, muzzled, foolish-looking china puppy became
+the Regent Street rage, and was forthwith attached as an ornament to
+every suburban house-door. Whose is the great mind who set these
+fashions, before whom every householder bows? It would be interesting
+to know.
+
+There is great opportunity for the ever-interesting study of human
+nature, in observing the ways of shops and shoppers. The really able
+shopman or saleswoman can make you buy just anything he or she wishes;
+it is a mere question of degree in artistic persuasion. Indeed I have
+often almost wept with sheer pain to see some graceful, fairy-like
+shop-damsel (chosen mainly, be it remarked, for her figure), throw
+some elegant wrap on to her slim shoulders, and turning to a fat,
+middle-aged matron, say smilingly, "_Just_ the very thing for you,
+ma'am!" And the deluded matron will buy the wrap, not even suspecting
+the pitiful ludicrousness of the situation. Truly, few people have a
+sense of humour. A friend of mine, who delights in new experiences,
+and enjoys seeing into the "highways and byways" of London life, once
+prevailed on a fashionable West End milliner, with whom she was well
+acquainted, to let her play the part of saleswoman for just one day.
+The results were afflicting to all concerned. The poor postulant
+nearly died of fatigue; every one's tempers were strained to the
+utmost; and several excellent customers were turned away. It was Kate
+Nickleby, Madam Mantalini, and Miss Knag, over again; especially Miss
+Knag. I learnt that, even before the arrival of the customers, a good
+day's work had to be "put in," in the decking and re-arranging of the
+shop-window. Every single hat and bonnet had to be taken from the
+stand, and carefully dusted, brushed, smartened up and replaced. And
+woe to the saleswoman who failed to effect a sale, more especially if
+that saleswoman happened to be unfortunate for two or three times in
+succession! My friend, after her sad experience of customers' ways,
+vowed ever to make it a point of religion to spend no more than ten
+minutes in the choosing of a hat, _and always to end by buying it_.
+
+Nevertheless, so far as the big, well-managed shops are concerned, the
+employes are not really deserving of pity; they have good food and
+lodging, with comparatively short hours, and the situations they fill
+are, as a rule, much sought after. It is, rather, the owners of the
+smaller establishments, in the poorer districts, who "sweat" their
+unfortunate shop-girls. Here the poor white slaves are often kept hard
+at work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Saturday nights till 12, with
+short intervals for hurried and indifferent meals. Of course, it is
+the working classes themselves who are the cause of this "sweating";
+these do their shopping late, on Saturday nights especially late; and
+shops, if they closed early in poor districts, would for this reason
+lose the greater part of their custom.
+
+The shop-girl in a really good West End establishment is in very
+different case. She is often more or less gently bred, such breeding
+being an important factor in her engagement. Very often, indeed, her
+superior manners contrast, oddly enough, with the rudeness of the
+"lady" whom she happens to be serving.
+
+Shop-girls and shop-men are always popular elements of London life.
+There was, quite lately, a comic opera written in the shop-girl's
+honour. And, so far as shop-men are concerned, it is an eloquent fact
+that in the recent revival of the Gilbert-and-Sullivan opera
+_Patience_, the only noteworthy alterations in the text were the
+substitution of the "Twopenny Tube young man" for the "Threepenny 'Bus
+young man," and of the words "Tottenham House" for the departed
+"Waterloo House." For a London audience must, above all things, be
+kept up to date, and a small anachronism of the latter kind, a mistake
+about the shops, would be noticed by them much sooner than a more
+important one.
+
+Everything can be got in London, if (and the "if" is a comprehensive
+one) you know where to go for it. Old timber, for instance, can be
+bought not only at the Westminster wharves, but also in the Euston
+Road (where Messrs. Maple's vast timber-yards are in themselves an
+insight into the "highways and byways" of London); old silver may be
+had in the now spoiled Hanway Street, and Holborn; old furniture and
+antiques in Wardour Street and its neighbourhood; new furniture in
+Tottenham Court Road; livestock in and about Seven Dials; artists'
+materials in Soho, and so on.... The best stationers' shops are in the
+City: the City shops, however, make a "speciality" of solid worth
+rather than of outside attractiveness, a quality in which the Regent
+Street and Oxford Street marts bear the palm. It is not really of much
+importance where you shop; it is, however, important to remember
+that, unless your money happens to be more valuable than your time,
+you had better not frequent cheap marts or crowded stores.
+
+[Illustration: _The Dog Fancier!!!_]
+
+Book-shops are very inadequate in London; so few are they indeed, that
+one is tempted to wonder what the "five millions, in the richest city
+in the world" read? In most foreign towns book-shops are to be found,
+in twos and threes, in every important street; in English provincial
+towns, if you want a book, you are usually directed to "a
+stationer's"; and even in London, book-shops must diligently be sought
+for, though, when found, they are, it must be confessed, usually very
+good.
+
+Second-hand book-shops are more plentiful than new book shops; and
+these are mostly strangely dark, dingy, and rambling places, where the
+depressed proprietor rarely seems to wish to part with any of his
+dusty stock-in-trade, but sits apart in dusky recesses, moody and
+abstracted like Eugene Aram, annotating a catalogue. He is the unique
+tradesman who does not appear to want to sell his goods. After he has
+got over his annoyance at being disturbed,--and if you do happen to
+come to terms with him,--he will, as likely as not, heave a deep sigh
+as he turns to search for some very second-hand sheets of brown paper
+to enwrap the second-hand treasure. These old book-shops, with their
+outlying "twopenny" and "fourpenny" boxes, are generally to be found
+on busy city thoroughfares, as if by intent to entrap the unwary and
+impecunious scholar on his way home from his office desk to his little
+suburban home. In such spiders' webs of temptation he has been known
+to spend, in one fatal half-hour, all the money destined for the
+butcher's bill, or for the gas rate!
+
+[Illustration: _In the Charing Cross Road._]
+
+But, while impoverished scholars have a weakness for second-hand
+literature, the big circulating libraries, on the other hand, are the
+great weakness of their wives and daughters, cousins and aunts. About
+these vast emporiums ladies of all ages flit all day like bees around
+a hive. Ladies would appear but seldom to buy books; they always hire.
+A morning spent at Smith's or Mudie's is curiously instructive as to
+the methods pursued by them in the search for light literature. The
+library counters then usually exhibit a double or treble row of women,
+with a very faint sprinkling of elderly men, all waiting, in varying
+degrees of patience, for their turn. Several of the ladies have
+considerately brought pet dogs, which they hold by the chain, the dear
+little animals being meanwhile thoughtfully engaged in entangling
+themselves round all the other customers' legs.
+
+"Have you some nice, new, _good_ novels?" asks a plaintive
+materfamilias, with a stolid-faced bevy of half-grown up daughters
+behind her, just out of the schoolroom. "Something, you know, that is
+quite fit for young girls; no problems, or pasts, or anything of that
+kind."
+
+The young man looks nonplussed. "We have Miss Yonge's latest," he
+suggests: "or Maeterlinck's _Life of the Bee_, just out--"
+
+"Oh! Maeterlinck is so very Maeterlincky, you know. And do you think
+that he's always quite _safe_?"
+
+"I assure you, madam, you will find him so in this instance," urges
+the young man.
+
+"Well, bees are, of course, interesting; and very nice and proper too,
+I'm sure; but I myself prefer the lives of celebrated people. Mr.
+Gladstone's Life, for instance? Oh, it's not _written_ yet, is it?
+What a bore! Well, I suppose it's no use our waiting.... And Miss
+Yonge, no, thank you.... You see, she died last year, and then she's
+so very Early-Victorian!"
+
+The man, seeing that it is to be a long business, gives up the problem
+for the moment, and moves in despair to the next customer.
+
+Now it is the turn of a little old lady, with a deprecating manner: "I
+want something nice, and not too clever," she murmured: "something I
+can _knit_ over, you know, after breakfast. No, _not_ religious, I
+somehow find that's too depressing. How would this do?" as she picked
+up a volume that was flaunting itself on the counter, "_Sir Richard
+Calmady_. I think I'd like that, if it's at all like _Sir George
+Tressady_."
+
+"No, madam, not at all the sort of thing for you," the young man
+hastened to say with an air of authority. "Allow _me_: Try _this_;
+this is a very safe book, Miss Edna Lyall's latest, _In Spite of
+All_. This (confidentially) is an author we always recommend."
+
+Now there bustled up a young-old lady with fuzzy hair and a sailor
+hat: "I want all the most go-ahead novels you have," she cried:
+"somethin' really startling, somethin' that'll keep you awake and
+excited all through."
+
+This lady being fortunately in a hurry, was quickly got rid of with a
+judicious mixture of Hall Caine, Guy Boothby, and Marie Corelli, in
+equal quantities.
+
+Finally there came a nondescript, pudding-faced young woman, who said,
+vaguely, as if fulfilling a painful duty: "I want a novel. What is
+being read now?" She, however, proved very amenable, and went off
+dutifully with _Elizabeth's Visits_, _The Love-letters of Anonyma_,
+and the _Transvaal War_.
+
+What vast knowledge of human nature must, one thinks, these young men
+at the libraries possess! They seem to enact the part of general
+literary adviser to the enormous feminine public. They know their
+types well, too: they rarely mistake. They may almost be said to form
+the minds of their customers; and they may, they possibly do, rule
+over a large proportion of human opinion.
+
+Ladies, as I said, seldom buy new books; they seem to prefer reading
+novels that others have well thumbed. New book-shops, therefore, are
+few and far between; they mostly congregate about St. Paul's, and in
+the neighbourhood of what used to be Holywell Street; for trades in
+London, as is well known, tend to have their own special districts. In
+the poorer quarters, however, and in the near suburbs, everything is,
+on the contrary, placed in the queerest juxtaposition; thus, you may
+see a house labelled "Embalming done here," between two others
+respectively inscribed: "Hot Dinners served here," and "Cheap Mangling
+done;" while the big shopping palaces in Westbourne Grove and
+elsewhere advertise themselves, modestly, to provide everything, from
+a coffin to a hired guest. Some of our shops and ways must indeed
+puzzle the unsophisticated foreigner. Mr. Samuel Butler has told an
+amusing story of how a poor Ticinese peasant woman was one day found
+on her knees in prayer before an elaborate dentist's "show case" in
+Soho,--imagining it, doubtless, to contain the relics of a saint!
+
+Shops, in some of the poor districts, afford remarkable insight into
+cockney character. There is, for instance, the old plant-hawker who
+sells you rotten roots with a sweet smile: there is the no less
+charming bird-fancier who gets rid of a songless hen-canary at the
+modest price of 10/-, assuring you, meanwhile, that "no better singer
+ever lived"; there is the lady-greengrocer who lets you have plums at
+a penny a pound dearer than the market-price--"though it's a robbin'
+me and my poor innercent childern, that's what it is!"
+
+It is not, however, always the shopman whose ways are most open to
+criticism. For, not only in the poorer districts, customers exist
+whose ideas of integrity are not of the finest. In Somers, Camden, or
+Kentish Towns, where the trader must, of necessity and from custom,
+spread out his goods in the street, to catch the eye, on projecting
+booths, that articles should occasionally be missed is, perhaps,
+hardly wonderful; and yet, curiously enough, it is rather in the big
+West End emporiums that shop-lifting is most common. Sales especially
+are most dangerous in this respect. Managers, notably of big drapery
+emporiums, say that they expect to lose a certain percentage regularly
+in this way: it is regarded as part of the business.
+
+"Oh, no! we don't prosecute now," a pleasant shop-walker said in
+answer to my inquiries on the subject: "It is too risky altogether;
+the thing isn't worth it. And we lost L500, one year, by getting hold
+of the wrong person ... it's so easy to mistake, in the crowd. No, we
+just place detectives here and there, where the biggest crushes are
+... they are dressed like ordinary customers, and carry parcels; so
+that no one could discover their business.... Then, if a detective
+happens to see a suspicious-looking individual, he marks her or
+him--(it is generally her), and follows, from one counter to another,
+to see if he is right. He doesn't speak until he is perfectly sure;
+but, when he is, he just goes up to the person and says politely,
+'Please, would you kindly follow me for a moment into the office?'
+Once in the office, the shop-lifter is made very quietly to
+disgorge.... It's nearly always a lady--very well connected some of
+them are, too.... She's never one of our reg'lar customers--sale-folks
+seem a kind of class by themselves, and we see nothing of them from
+one sale-day to another. Some of them make hay then, and no
+mistake.... Why, madam," said the shop-walker, warming to his
+narrative, "why, I've seen ladies go into that office, quite stout
+persons, and come out of it so thin, you'd hardly know 'em again....
+They just wear cloaks with deep inside pockets all round."
+
+"And don't they ever object, or make a commotion in the shop?" I
+inquired.
+
+"No, they go as quiet as lambs mostly ... and other customers don't
+notice anything.... You see, they know there's no help for 'em, no use
+for 'em to brazen it out, lined with silks, and laces and stuffs as
+they are. Afterwards, we just warn 'em kindly, and let 'em go. They
+rarely do it twice in the same shop."
+
+"What sort of things do they generally take?" I asked.
+
+"Why, lace, and bits o' ribbon, put up in odd lots for sale, things
+lying about loose on the counter, like they are at sale times.
+Well-dressed they are, too, you wouldn't think they could want 'em
+badly. 'Oh, it must 'a got up my sleeve,' some of 'em say, looking
+most innocent, with perhaps two or three yards of brocade or surah
+hangin' out of their golf-capes.... They've got a kind of a fancy, as
+well, for religious books: no knowing why, for religion," added the
+shop-walker thoughtfully, "has evidently done them no good."
+
+With which reflection I cordially agreed.
+
+Sales, however tempting, should be avoided by the unwary shopper, for
+they are dangerous as spiders' webs. They usually occur twice a year,
+in January and July; in January, they relieve the tedium of the winter
+fogs; in July, they are a very midsummer madness. The sales vary in
+honesty. Some of them are really held in order to clear out, at a
+sacrifice, the "old stock"; some, especially in the smaller shops, are
+simply quick sales of "cheap lines," bought in on purpose, and strewn
+about heterogeneously on the counters. Sale days are truly terrible
+experiences to the uninitiated. If you happened, unwittingly, to go to
+some familiar shop on one of these yearly occasions, the mass of
+crowded, struggling, gasping humanity, nearly all pushing, and nearly
+all fat, would lead you to imagine that life and death, at least, were
+intimately concerned in the tussle, instead of merely the question of
+securing the "first choice" of "Remnants."
+
+The shopping, however, of the rich is one thing, and the shopping of
+the very poor is quite another. Most interesting, to those who care to
+study the book of human nature, are the "street-markets" of the
+people, those rows of noisy booths and barrows which have stood from
+time immemorial, by traditional right, in certain streets, and where
+jets of brilliant, flaring naptha-lights display the kaleidoscopic
+stock-in-trade. Among such streets are Goodge Street, Tottenham Court
+Road; Leather Lane, Holborn; or, to descend to a yet lower social
+depth, Brick Lane, Spitalfields. Booths and barrows are, as everybody
+knows, not allowed to obstruct the majority of streets, being
+generally limited to slums or wretched paved alleys; here, however,
+the authorities evidently make exceptions in favour of certain ancient
+vested rights. In Goodge Street fruit and vegetables are mainly sold;
+in Leather Lane, tools, appliances, pedlars' wares, butchers' meat;
+everything, in fact, in infinite variety; in Spitalfields, birds and
+live-stock, together with old clothes, and second-hand articles
+generally. In such street-markets, from eight to ten on Saturday night
+is the gala time for business. M. Gabriel Mourey says:
+
+     "These streets of London, where the poor do their marketing,
+     are, on Saturday night, gay with light and thronged with
+     people. Because of the next day's rest, there is, until past
+     midnight, an open market, which invades the pavement with
+     costers' barrows heaped with fruit, butchers' stalls, booths
+     of incongruous articles, kitchen utensils, old tools, all
+     the bric-a-brac of the second-hand suburban shop; vehicular
+     traffic is suspended; all barriers are encroached upon;
+     everyone walks in the middle of the street. Dealers and
+     brokers offer shoes, clothing, hats, boots, plates and
+     dishes, all at ridiculous prices."
+
+Curious, indeed, are the bits of life and character that are to be met
+with on these London by-ways. Not changed one whit in essentials since
+Dickens's time, they recall his wonderful insight, observation, and
+inimitable cockney touches. There are small differences, of course;
+the street matrons, for instance, have changed their former floppy
+caps for battered sailor hats, or other articles of damaged head-gear;
+the use of their nails, as an offensive weapon, for the more
+formidable "hat-pin." The traditional dress of the self-respecting
+feminine street-dealer is, however, still as sternly conventional in
+its way as the Mayfair belle's. At the present day it consists,
+usually, of a black cloth or plush jacket, a vividly red or blue
+skirt, a large white apron, a black hat of either the "feather" or
+"sailor" variety, slovenly boots down at heel, and,--most important
+point of all--long and conspicuous gold earrings. Thus attired, the
+lady street-vendor haggles and chaffers all day in a conscious
+elegance and propriety. The ladies of the profession generally
+monopolize the itinerant greengrocery trade; and among their customers
+you may still see some Mrs. Prig, carefully selecting a juicy
+"cowcumber" for the supper of her "friend and pardner, Sairey Gamp";
+while yonder, perhaps, is some Mrs. Tibbs, or Mrs. Todgers, carefully
+appraising the piece of steak destined for the dinner of her rapacious
+boarders, and weighed down by all the distracting cares of paying
+guests. Near by, perhaps Jo, that poor vagrant, finger in mouth, eyes
+wistfully a juicy plateful of shellfish that the "winkle-barrow" man
+has just got ready for a customer. Then, maybe, a hansom rattles by
+with a jaded diner-out, yawning from a sense of the emptiness, not of
+his stomach, but of society and life, and you recall almost
+unconsciously Molloy's haunting words:
+
+  "Go thy way! Let me go mine,
+   I to starve, and thou to dine."
+
+[Illustration: _Saturday Night Shopping._]
+
+Let us, however, hope that those who really "starve" are few in
+number. For the barrow-men, who pay small rates as compared to
+shop-owners, give good value in return for their money, with much
+homely wit and caustic joking thrown in; and poor, indeed, must be the
+household that cannot enjoy, on Saturday night, their something "'ot
+with innions," their portion of fried fish, or of sheeps' trotters. Of
+course, when dealing with barrows, the buyer must have as many eyes as
+possible. "Let the buyer beware" may be specially said of this class
+of shopping. It were perhaps too much to expect, as Mr. Oliver Wendell
+Holmes seems to suggest, that fruit, when you buy it, should "grow
+bigger _downwards_ through the box"; yet, perhaps, when you see a pile
+of luscious pears or apples heaped up temptingly in front of you, you
+need not allow yourself to be fobbed off with a few rotten ones,
+shovelled up carelessly from unseen depths behind. Much art is
+necessary when dealing with a barrow-man, who, as often as not, really
+respects the careful and fastidious shopper, and retorts to her
+complaints with a good-natured joke. If a trifle less distant in
+manner than his West-End brother, he is certainly more affectionate,
+and dubs his customer "my dear." But, in the street markets, it is
+usually the meat-huckster who is the greatest "character." His voice
+may be heard above the general din: "Buy my pretty meat," he shouts
+from his stall to the red-armed housewives; "now, lydies, don't go a
+fingerin' it _too_ much, or it'll taste er kid gloves when you go to
+eat it.... 'Ave that there sheep's 'ed, Miss? wy, certingly; that wuz
+a _'appy_ sheep, that wuz! jest look at the smile 'e's got on 'im;
+know'd you wuz a-goin' to buy 'im, 'e did.... There now, my dear! look
+wot you've been and done, rolled that there bit 'o' shin in the mud,
+it'll 'ave to go for _cats'_ meat now," &c. &c.
+
+This kind of "patter," continued _ad libitum_, seems to be regarded as
+the slum butcher's special _metier_.
+
+In Brick Lane, Spitalfields,--not the Jewish "Ghetto," but the purely
+English quarter,--there is, moreover, a Sunday morning "poor man's
+market." It is usually, in more select London highways, more or less
+difficult to make purchases, be they never so necessary, on Sunday
+morning. I remember, indeed, a despairing search for food on such an
+occasion (food necessitated by the arrival of unexpected visitors),
+which ended in the obtaining, almost by force, of a couple of boiled
+chickens from a small Italian restaurant, with the added injunction to
+"keep them well hidden" from the eye of the law on the homeward
+journey. In the East End, however, it is very different. Brick Lane,
+an unsavoury region, described by the late Mr. Montagu Williams as "a
+land of beer and blood," presents on Sunday morning a strange sight to
+the uninitiated. Here is its picture by an eye-witness:
+
+     "In Brick Lane ... scenes are to be witnessed on Sunday
+     mornings which afford a companion picture to those in
+     Whitechapel. The East End English have also, like the Jews,
+     their 'poor man's market,' and where Shoreditch, Bethnal
+     Green and Spitalfields meet at the northern part of Brick
+     Lane, which is in Spitalfields, the poorest and meanest of
+     them are to be found. In the early part of Sunday morning,
+     for a couple of hours or so, there is a woman's market where
+     cast-off clothes, tawdry finery, and the newest things in
+     hats and feathers are bartered. Heterogeneous heaps of
+     clothing, boots and shoes included, lie spread over the
+     ground, and some amusing scenes are to be witnessed. Pass
+     along Sclater Street and new scenes meet the eye. The women
+     are left behind, and men and boys are met with. Instead of
+     old clothes one sees and hears twittering birds. Here come
+     the pigeon fanciers from all parts of Bethnal Green and
+     Spitalfields; birds of all kinds are to be bought, and the
+     noise and bustle are in striking contrast to the subdued,
+     sorrow-stricken tone of the women's market. It does not
+     require any long acquaintance with these scenes to discover
+     that the men are fonder of their birds than of their wives.
+     Nowhere is bird-fancying and pigeon-breeding more general
+     than in the crowded East End. Where one would think there
+     was not house-room enough or food enough for human
+     occupants, prize birds of great value are reared--most
+     probably with money that should have gone to feed and clothe
+     the children."
+
+The special markets where the poor buy and sell are not, however,
+exactly tempting to the well-to-do, unless in search of "copy" or
+other experience. For those London visitors who do not appreciate the
+slums, yet whose olfactory organs are not too fastidious, the big
+London markets, Covent Garden, Smithfield, Billingsgate, will perhaps
+afford a sufficient experience in that line. Billingsgate is the most
+perilous excursion of the three. Its aroma is strong and lasting, and
+the stranger in its diverging courts and alleys runs considerable
+danger of having winkle-barrels or fish crates descend on his devoted
+head, as they are lowered from the wharves on to their respective
+carts. Yes, a little of Billingsgate will undoubtedly go a very long
+way; yet it is an interesting place to have seen, and the strange,
+sudden appearance of ancient churches,--St. Dunstan's, St. Magnus, St.
+Mary-at-Hill,--incongruously calm amid the wild turmoil all round
+them,--gives a momentary peace even "amid the City's jar." The
+language of Billingsgate fish-wives and porters is proverbial, yet it
+is perhaps hardly worse than in many other less fishy quarters of
+London. The Coal Exchange, opposite Billingsgate, has, with its broad
+flight of steps, on which people sit, itself a kind of ecclesiastical
+look. The fish market opens at five in the morning.
+
+All this quarter of London is a vast hive of industry. The stranger
+should walk along the busy thoroughfare of Upper and Lower Thames
+Street all the way from the Tower to St. Paul's; tall, blackened,
+ever-devouring warehouses line the street, which is a very inferno of
+bustle and labour. Though the street is muddy and noisy, and its
+perambulation may not impossibly render the pedestrian more than a
+little cross, he will, at any rate, gain from it some insight into
+London life. Mr. Hare describes the scene well:
+
+     "Thames Street," he says, "is the very centre of turmoil.
+     From the huge warehouses along the sides, with their
+     chasm-like windows and the enormous cranes which are so
+     great a feature of this part of the City, the rattling of
+     the chains and the creaking of the cords, by which enormous
+     packages are constantly ascending and descending, mingle
+     with uproar from the roadway beneath. Here the hugest
+     waggons, drawn by Titanic dray horses, and attended by
+     waggoners in smock-frocks, are always lading or discharging
+     their enormous burthens of boxes, barrels, crates, timber,
+     iron, or cork."
+
+But, though a visit to Billingsgate is only faintly suggested, and the
+delights of the great central meat-market of Smithfield are, it is
+fair to say, only capable of thorough appreciation by farmers and
+connoisseurs, every visitor to London ought to be enjoined to go and
+see Covent Garden Market, and preferably in the early hours of the
+spring morning, the time of its highest activity. Not only interesting
+at the present day as a special focus of London life, Covent Garden
+has, also, the classic charm of history. For as early as the
+thirteenth century this was the "convent garden" of Westminster,
+supplying its monks with fruit and vegetables. That the course of
+centuries and the habit of cockneys has dropped the sacred "n," and
+changed the name into "Covent Garden" is easily understood. Covent
+Garden is still faithful to its fruit and vegetables, though these,
+alas! are no longer to be seen _growing_ there, but are transported
+thither from the rich gardens of England, as well as from colonies and
+nations overseas. Here, within this small enclosure, can be got, it is
+said, all that skill can grow, care can transport, and money can buy.
+Here can be obtained, at any time, and at short notice, the roses of a
+Heliodorus, or the orchids of a Vanderbilt; together with priceless
+fruits in mid-winter, new vegetables in February frosts, and tropical
+produce all the year round. The middle avenue of Covent Garden is
+expensive, but it can produce anything wished for in the fruit and
+flower line. Riches in such places are as the magic wand of an
+Aladdin. The central avenue of the market is refined and polite;
+outside its limits, however, the manners of the locality are original
+and peculiar, a kind of "law unto themselves." The Covent Garden
+porters and market-women are rough diamonds; the men, especially, full
+of good-natured horse-play, seem alarming on a first introduction, but
+harmless when you are used to them. Yet I have known timid ladies who
+have shrunk from a walk through "the Garden," imagining its denizens
+to be robbers and cut-throats, or, at least, revolutionary citizens of
+a supposed "Reign of Terror!"
+
+Covent Garden is at its highest glory on certain May mornings, from
+about six to eight,--on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays,--which are
+special "market days." On these occasions the din and bustle is
+indescribable; and "Mud-Salad Market," justifying its title, becomes a
+green sea of spring vegetables, interspersed with still greener
+islands of laden, tottering market carts. The show of cut flowers is a
+wonderful sight, and street hawkers, flower-girls, itinerant
+flower-vendors and plant-sellers, are one and all busy making their
+special "bargains." The flower-girls, untidy, shawled and befeathered,
+sit about on doorsteps or on upturned market baskets making their
+"button-holes" for the day, and scanning anxiously the weather;--so
+much of their profit depends on that! They are all a cheery, though
+somewhat rowdy, folk, who mean no harm by their very outspoken
+witticisms. Even their rowdiness is an historic legacy; for, in past
+days, this neighbourhood used to be ravaged by the redoubted street
+bullies called "Mohocks" or "Scourers," pests of an older time. There
+is a well-known print of Covent Garden Market, from Hogarth's picture,
+_Morning_; the print shows the red, barn-like Church of St. Paul
+dominating, as it still does, the market, and the old taverns near to
+it. The taverns and inns of Covent Garden used to be famous, but have
+now mostly decayed, like its "Piazza," or Italian colonnade, little of
+which is now left standing, but which was once the glory of the town.
+Thackeray, who used to stay at the "Bedford," thus describes the place
+in his day:
+
+     "The two great national theatres on one side, a churchyard
+     full of mouldy but undying celebrities on the other; a
+     fringe of houses studded in every part with anecdote or
+     history; an arcade, often more gloomy and deserted than a
+     cathedral aisle; a rich cluster of brown old taverns, one of
+     them filled with the counterfeit presentments of many actors
+     long since silent, who scowl and smile once more from the
+     canvas upon the grandsons of their dead admirers; a
+     something in the air which breathes of old books, old
+     painters, and old authors; a place beyond all other places
+     one would choose in which to hear the chimes at midnight, a
+     crystal palace--the representative of the present--which
+     presses in timidly from a corner upon many things of the
+     past; a withered bank that has been sucked dry by a
+     felonious clerk, a squat building with a hundred columns,
+     and chapel-looking fronts, which always stands knee-deep in
+     baskets, flowers, and scattered vegetables; a common centre
+     into which Nature showers her choicest gifts, and where the
+     kindly fruits of the earth often nearly choke the narrow
+     thoroughfares; a population that never seems to sleep, and
+     that does all in its power to prevent others sleeping; a
+     place where the very latest suppers and the earliest
+     breakfasts jostle each other over the footways."
+
+Fielding, the novelist, devotes in _Humphry Clinker_ a page or two to
+Covent Garden market, which he supposes to be described by an old
+country gentleman. The writer complains of its dearness and dirt:
+
+     "It must be owned," (he says), "that Covent Garden affords
+     some good fruit; which, however, is always engrossed by a
+     few individuals of overgrown fortune, at an exorbitant
+     price; so that little else than the refuse of the market
+     falls to the share of the community; and that is distributed
+     by such filthy hands, as I cannot look at without loathing."
+
+The old gentleman also goes on to complain of the nightly terrors of
+the London "watchman, bawling the hour through every street and
+thundering at every door." This custom, fortunately for us, is now in
+abeyance; also the street cries of London (at least in its more polite
+circles) are likewise much diminished in intensity. Even the muffin
+man's bell, so welcome in the winter afternoon's gloom, seems now more
+seldom heard. "Sweet Lavender," however, still has a familiar autumn
+sound, and the flower-hawkers of spring are still discordant. Yet
+one's ears are no longer so generally deafened, and the reason for
+this is not far to seek. For London is now so gay with advertisements
+that in every direction our eyes meet strange, gaily-coloured hoarding
+and sky signs; and the manifold attractions of various articles,
+instead of being cried in the streets, now cry at us from the walls,
+or shout discordantly at us from out of the blue of heaven, from ugly
+black wires and glaring brazen letters. We cannot go out of doors
+without being asked a hundred times, in varying type, such silly
+questions as "Why does a Woman Look Old Sooner than a Man?" "Why Let
+Your Baby Die?" "Why Pay House Rent?" or other such idiotic queries.
+Why, who _would_ pay house rent, especially in London, if he or she
+could help it? In shops, or on railways, it is the same. For at least
+several miles out of London you travel in the constant company of
+"Pears's Soap," and "Colman's Mustard;" and outside eating-shops you
+see in large letters the cunning legend, "Everything as Nice as Mother
+Makes it." The Art of Advertisement is everywhere paramount. You
+cannot even travel in the humble omnibus without being implored "not
+to let your wife worry over the house-cleaning," and being asked "why
+your nose gets red after eating"; together with suggested remedies for
+both these sad states of things. These are really, when one comes to
+think of it, impertinent personalities. This mania for posters has, of
+course, largely resulted from the modern spread of education: for of
+what use to ask such questions in old days, when few could have
+succeeded in reading them? The fashion of advertisements is still
+growing, the Americans are encouraging it to preposterous proportions;
+and we shall soon, indeed, live in a mere criss-cross of lettered
+wires, not unlike Mr. Wells's idea of a future Utopia.
+
+Yet far away be that time still! Although the threatening wires
+already faintly line the blue here and there above our city gardens,
+although telephones and electric connections necessitate the continual
+dragging up of our streets, London has its charm still, and sweet is
+yet the London summer when the square lilacs and acacias blossom, and
+when, to quote Mr. Andrew Lang, "fans for a penny are sold in the
+Strand!"
+
+  "When strawberry pottles are common and cheap,
+   Ere elms be black, or limes be sere,
+   When midnight dances are murdering sleep,
+   Then comes in the sweet o' the year!"
+
+(Though I fear me that Mr. Andrew Lang did not mean it altogether in
+that sense!)
+
+The London children love flowers. "Give me a flower, lydy," some of
+the ragged street waifs will say, as you come back, laden with your
+store, from Covent Garden. And the child will take the flower
+lovingly, and stick it forthwith into her ragged bodice, smiling like
+a conscious princess.
+
+[Illustration: _An Aerated Bread Shop._]
+
+The subject of shops and markets would lead us naturally to that of
+restaurants. These, at the present day, are many and excellent. While
+the more ancient taverns of Covent Garden and of the City have
+largely lost their fashionable vogue, the general improvement in
+restaurants and modern hotels has been rapid. In the last twenty
+years, revolutions have been worked in this respect. Twenty years ago,
+to begin with small things, a cup of tea at a confectioner's cost at
+least sixpence, and was not always easy to get; now, it is obtainable
+for two or three pence anywhere, and for a penny at cheap shops.
+Everything else in the commissariat has improved and cheapened in
+proportion. Elegant little dinners may be had now at all prices; from
+the famous "Savoy" dinner at a guinea, to the cheap and dainty repast
+"in the Italian style" at 2_s._ 6_d._ Of this latter class is the
+"Comedy" Restaurant, Panton Street, in a small and hidden by-way,
+where little dinners, comprising smart waiters, separate tables,
+candle-shades, and table decorations, are provided for the modest
+price of half-a-crown per head. Or at the Holborn Restaurant Dinner,
+at 3_s._ 6_d._, you may, if so inclined, enjoy the strains of a band,
+while entertaining your pre-theatre party. Or, if you be rich, the big
+hall of the new and expensive "Carlton" is now the most modish place
+for after-theatre supper parties. Here the parting guest is politely
+"sped," if he linger, by lamps discreetly and suggestively lowered at
+intervals.... Ah, what a delightful city London is for the rich to
+live in! Everything may be had and enjoyed!
+
+The Art, then, even the Poetry, of Dining, may be thoroughly studied
+in London at the present day. Every passing mood may be consulted,
+every gastronomic fancy indulged. You may choose your company as you
+choose your _menu_; you may make a free selection from the quality of
+either. You have but to know exactly beforehand what you want. If the
+lady whom you honour be frivolous by nature, you can take her to the
+smart restaurant of the Hotel Bristol, and to a comedy adapted "from
+the French"; if she be serious, to the "Grand Hotel," and then to
+Shakespeare; if crude, to Frascati's and to melodrama. But, whether
+you choose expensive dining places or cheap ones, and in whatever
+manner you may elect to spend your long London day, one thing is
+certain, that at its close you will generally find yourself to have
+spent a considerable sum. For, howe'er improved and reformed, in
+essentials the city is yet not much changed since the days of John
+Lydgate, who found, he says, to his cost, and even so early as the
+fifteenth century that:
+
+  "lacking mony I mighte not spede."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE GALLERIES, MUSEUMS, AND COLLECTIONS
+
+     "Infinite riches in a little room."
+
+     "The great city has an unbroken history of 1,000 years, and
+     has never been sacked by an enemy."--_Sir Walter Besant._
+
+     "Great are your privileges. For you is collected in the
+     public palaces of London all that human genius has ever
+     achieved, all that power and wealth can procure. For you has
+     been dug from the earth all that remains of mighty empires
+     and long-vanished civilisations. The arts of Greece and
+     Rome, and Egypt and Assyria, and the not less wonderful arts
+     of India, are all contributory to your pleasures. The whole
+     art and mystery of painting is unfolded for you on the walls
+     of our National Gallery.... You are rich indeed, for you are
+     the heirs of all the Ages."
+
+
+Are picture-galleries, museums, and such-like treasures of the
+metropolis, to be described as London's Highways, or as its Byways?
+That they ought to be the former, is certain; as certain as that they
+are but too often used as the latter, or are, at any rate, regarded as
+refuges and shelters from the inclemency of the outer air. For Art,
+like Religion, has a tendency in this respect, to serve not so much as
+a cloak, as in the capacity of an umbrella. And it is sometimes
+conveniently adapted to yet other profane uses: "This 'ere ain't a
+gymnasium, nor yet a refreshment room," I have heard a much-enduring
+officer of the law remark, more in sorrow than in anger, to a
+too-presuming visitor, who, seated opposite the _Ansidei Madonna_, was
+placidly feeding such of her offspring as were not engaged in playing
+leap-frog over the chairs, with crumbly bath-buns.
+
+[Illustration: _A Sketch in Trafalgar Square._]
+
+These, however, are varieties in the human species that are ever with
+us. "Fear not to Sow because of the Birds," says the Koran; and the
+widespread sowing of culture has so far shown results, that every year
+the British Museum, the National Gallery, and other kindred
+institutions, are growing more popular and more frequented. In Art and
+Knowledge, as in other directions, it takes time for "the People" to
+appreciate fully their oldest, much less their newest, heritage. Such
+treasures in our vast metropolis are still too much hidden, still
+undiscovered by the majority. Even the educated visitor fresh from the
+country does not immediately realise the fact that he is free at any
+time to walk the marble halls of the National Gallery, to hear the
+fountain plashing in the Pompeian hall of the riverside palace raised
+by Sir Henry Tate to modern British Art, or to follow the strange
+instincts and laws of Nature in the beautifully arranged Natural
+History Museum of Kensington. The recent movement for "Sunday
+opening," now more or less widespread, has tended greatly to the
+popularisation of the national collections, and does a good deal,
+also, to the mitigation of the too utter gloom of the stranger's
+"Sunday in London." Even M. Taine, who in the "sixties" compared the
+metropolis of his day to "a well-ordered cemetery," or "a large
+manufactory of bone-black closed on account of a death," would surely
+have been less severely splenetic had but a museum or two been open to
+beguile his tedium. In our present year of grace, the British Museum,
+from two till four, is thronged by the lower middle-class, who, if
+their affection for mummies is a trifle out of proportion to the
+interest they take in the Elgin Marbles, and their love of historic
+missals is sometimes too subordinate to the intricacies of the
+neighbouring World's Unique Stamp-Collection, yet show in their way an
+intelligent and praiseworthy desire for knowledge.
+
+These treasure-houses of London,--what wealth do they not
+represent,--what unimagined riches do they not contain? London, the
+richest city in the world, yet for so long a period far behind other
+capitals in representative art, has in the last century equalled, if
+not surpassed them all. Some fifty or more years ago, the great
+"Pan-Opticon" of Leicester Square, the precursor of the present
+Biograph and Cinematograph, was the chief "artistic" glory of London.
+In the days of our grandfathers, people were for ever taken to see
+this "Pan-Opticon," a great building with endless galleries, on the
+site of the present "Alhambra"; where you saw all the things of the
+world and the glory thereof. Now this baby-show is superseded by
+museums and galleries filled with the most priceless gems of art and
+of history: yes, the London collections may in this sense be regarded
+as variations of the Pan-Opticon--Pan-Opticons of a nobler kind.
+London's National Gallery is now a collection of pictures worthy of so
+great a nation, her museums are filled with the best of the spoils of
+ancient Greek art. If London has been late in awaking to her artistic
+responsibilities, at any rate she takes them seriously enough at the
+present day. And, of late years, her art treasure has been enormously
+and continuously enriched, not only by the expenditure of public
+moneys, but by private bequest and private munificence. Rich men, with
+true patriotism, have spent their lives in painfully searching for,
+and collecting, beautiful things, to leave them, afterwards, freely to
+the nation. Millionaires, too, have, it would seem, their uses. And we
+are thus all, in a sense, millionaires, for we inherit the priceless
+treasures of others, and we enjoy the fruits of their lifelong toil.
+
+It is in London, more than anywhere, that the real poetry of living
+may be enjoyed, and that every passing artistic whim may be indulged.
+Does your mind require stimulating by the study of Greek art? the
+galleries of the British Museum are open to you; or
+
+  "Dost thou love pictures? we will fetch thee straight
+   Adonis painted by a running brook;
+   Or Cytherea, 'mid the sedges hid,
+   That seem to move and wanton with her breath."
+
+Or do you feel that what your mood needs is the contemplation of
+beautiful eighteenth century French furniture, and Fragonard's
+pictures? Go then, to Hertford House in quiet Manchester Square, and
+see the world-famed Wallace Collection. The "Wallace Collection," that
+pearl of great price, of which the bequest has recently so convulsed
+the art world, is the latest expression of the patriotism of wealth.
+Collected mainly by the third Marquess of Hertford,--the "Lord Steyne"
+of Thackeray's novel,--and his successor the fourth Marquess, Attache
+at the Paris Embassy,--the treasure, since its formation, has met, at
+one time or another, with strange and unique adventures. In Paris, the
+fourth Marquess, Richard Seymour Conway, built for his collection "a
+stately pleasure house," fitted and designed after his own sumptuous
+taste; living meanwhile, his wealth no doubt crippled by his vast
+"unearned increment," not, indeed, as a miser, but in a degree of
+seclusion that almost amounted to eccentricity. During the Commune,
+the bulk of that collection that we now admire was even, it is said,
+buried in underground cellars for safety. The beautiful French
+furniture,--the bric-a-brac, blazing with enamels and precious
+stones,--one can well imagine these the constant delight of the old
+collector, with whom the love for such things had become a ruling
+passion. Yet, by the irony of fate, this fourth Lord Hertford suffered
+from a painful disease, a continual affliction which, they say, only
+the news of victories achieved in sale rooms, by his agents, over some
+rival collector, at all tended to alleviate.
+
+Though reproached during his lifetime as an "absentee landlord," a
+nobleman who preferred residence in Paris to a home in his native
+land, Lord Hertford has certainly, in the upshot, been proved to have
+deserved as well as any man of his country. Time's revenges are slow,
+but they are effective; and the fourth Marquess, the flouted foreign
+resident, has proved, indirectly, the greatest patriot of his age.
+But, while the old nobleman's sentiment appears to have been mainly
+negative (as shown, for instance, by his decision that the collection
+should not enrich the Louvre), it was really Sir Richard Wallace, his
+successor, faithful friend, and co-collector (some say, also near
+kinsman), who should have the largest share of the nation's gratitude.
+
+Sir Richard Wallace, Lord Hertford's sole heir, deciding, after the
+imminent dangers of the Commune, that it was rash to leave the
+inheritance thus at the mercy of vandalism, removed it, in 1872, to
+London, where, for three years, it filled the Bethnal Green Museum;
+being removed to Hertford House, the London residence of the family
+(by then arranged to receive it), in 1875. Sir Richard, whose only son
+had meanwhile died, left in his turn the whole of the property to his
+wife, a French lady, whose loyalty to her husband's country should
+cause her name, for all time, to be writ large on the roll of honour.
+Here, in Hertford House, a few years after Sir Richard's death, Lady
+Wallace died; and, in accordance with her husband's secret wish,
+bequeathed the whole of the immense property to the British nation.
+And now, for future ages, Hertford House, with all its myriad
+treasures, a collection perfect as it stands, fresh from the
+arrangement and taste of the collector, will be the glorious heritage
+of the nation.
+
+One of the greatest charms of Hertford House is that it suggests none
+of the red-tapeism, or of the dull uniformity of a museum, and,
+consequently, does not affect visitors, as so many museums do, with a
+primary sense of fatigue and boredom. The rooms of the palatial
+mansion are still arranged mainly as they were in the owner's time;
+the long suites of reception saloons, through which the reflected
+sunlight glitters,--vistas of French tapestries, pictures,
+lapis-lazuli, enamels, and Sevres china,--convey all the suggestion,
+even in prosaic London, of a fairy palace. Even a Countess d'Aulnoy,
+with her wealth of imagery, could hardly have imagined a finer setting
+for her Gracieuse and Percinet, or any of their dainty royal line.
+There is an _intime_ air, almost as of home, even about the long
+picture gallery where the Gainsboroughs and Sir Joshuas smile sedately
+upon us. The sweet presentments of fair dead ladies, seen here in
+their proper setting; the Pompeian central courtyard and plashing
+fountain, whence, it is said, the aged Lady Wallace was daily to be
+seen, leaning from the balcony that projects from the upper rooms, to
+feed her crowd of birds, eager pensioners, with their breakfast of
+crumbs; these combine to give an atmosphere of human charm, a thing
+quite apart from the usual cold aloofness of museums. It is again the
+idea of the Soane Museum, but on a very magnificent scale. Beautiful
+in its publicity, how mysteriously lovely must it not have been in the
+days of its seclusion! One can almost share the feelings of that old
+retainer who said, on the last sad day before the opening; "Ah, Sir!
+the Wallace Collection, _as it was_, you and I will never see
+again--for the _common people_ are going to be let in!"
+
+Londoners, in this instance, at any rate, fully appreciate the
+magnificence of the gift made them. Hertford House is, on fine days,
+usually thronged; all classes are represented there; but there is
+noticeably more of the "smart world" to be seen there, than is usually
+to be found in London galleries. The "smart world," as distinguished
+from the scholarly; but the scholarly world is to be met there too,
+and will still visit Hertford House, after the "Good Society" has
+forsaken it, and betaken itself to some newer haunt of fashion. In
+each of London's picture galleries and museums, its special
+_clientele_ may very easily be detected; and, at any rate, that of
+Hertford House is certainly, so far, the best-dressed. Among the crowd
+are often to be seen groups of young girls, demurely following in the
+wake of some feminine leader, who discourses to them about the
+pictures, and the various schools of painting,--a thing, this, that
+surely requires some courage in a mixed community. It is not to be
+denied that the visitor is often sadly in need of some guide: "Are all
+these pictures hand-painted?" I have myself heard a well-dressed and
+(presumably) well-educated young girl say, at the National Gallery.
+Perhaps it is a felt want, for one never knows what extra "following"
+one may not, unconsciously, attract: I myself once saw an unhappy lady
+lecturer, carried away by the enthusiasm of the subject, turn round
+and give an eloquent peroration and summary of it to a policeman, a
+deaf old lady, and a nursemaid carrying a vacant looking baby:
+
+"Now," said the lady cheerfully, "just to show what you have learned,
+tell me, in your own words, what you consider to have been the
+influence of Giotto on Early Italian Art?"
+
+No one answered; but the vacant baby, apparently thinking it a
+challenge, wailed.
+
+And, in Hertford House, the custom lends itself to additional dangers;
+for peripatetic classes are many, and in the nooks and unexpected
+corners of the mansion, it is fatally easy to lose your special crowd
+of students altogether, and to attach yourself, again unconsciously,
+to some one else's flock; who, by the chilly indifference with which
+they receive your well-intentioned homilies, soon make you
+unpleasantly aware of your mistake. Like "Little Bo-Peep," you then
+vainly pursue your wandering sheep, from one gallery into another,
+feeling, perhaps, that the pursuit of pupils, as of Art, has its
+drawbacks; and that tea, in the shape of the nearest "Aerated," is all
+too distant.
+
+The "sheep" in question are, however, discovered at last, placidly
+gloating over the wonderful collection of jewelled snuff-boxes--was
+there ever such a marvellous display of miniatures and of brilliants?
+Truly, the eighteenth century was a luxurious age!... Surely, no one
+can ever have dared to sit comfortably on those priceless chairs, or
+to have taken tea out of a Sevres cup, at one of those marvellously
+inlaid, jewel-encrusted tables?
+
+The pictures, however, are the chief delight of Hertford House. It is
+easy to admire porcelain, armour, bric-a-brac; but to really enjoy it
+in the best sense, one must be more or less learned in the cult; while
+pictures, though their full appreciation implies a certain amount of
+education, are better understanded of the multitude. But, though the
+British and foreign schools are well represented, it is the unrivalled
+collection of French pictures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
+centuries, works by Watteau, Lancret, Fragonard, Greuze, and all the
+noted painters of the French school, that the great world, primarily,
+flock to see at Hertford House. Twenty-one pictures by Greuze alone
+will delight the lovers of that painter's work, and bring their minds
+back to the eternally-charming affectations of that eighteenth century
+in which so many of our modern poets yearn to have lived. One can
+imagine, for instance, Mr. Austin Dobson echoing Campbell's lovely
+lines to the pretty, typical girl-face that Greuze loved so well:
+
+  "Transported to thy time I seem,
+     Though dust thy coffin covers--
+   And hear the songs, in fancy's dream,
+     Of thy devoted lovers."...
+
+Here, naive as always, yet never quite without a certain faint
+meretriciousness of effect, the "girl-child" of Greuze looks down on
+the visitor in every costume and attitude.
+
+In the long picture-gallery that forms one side of the great
+quadrangle, there are large canvases by Reynolds, Gainsborough,
+Romney, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Hals, Murillo, and many others. Here is
+a charming picture of "Miss Bowles" by Reynolds,--the little girl with
+round eyes, cuddling a dog, so long familiar to us by engraving or
+print; and here, too, is Frans Hals's _Laughing Cavalier_, whose
+infectious laugh lingers so long in the memory.
+
+Sir Richard Wallace offered his collection, with his house, to the
+nation before his death; the Government, however, after the usual
+manner of Governments in such matters, raised objections; and the
+affair subsided, till the surprise of the widow's legacy came, and
+showed the long and serious intention of the gift. One little picture,
+_The Peace of Muenster_, by Terburg, a small historical panel of untold
+and unique value, was, indeed, given by Sir Richard to the National
+Gallery before his death; yet even this gift had a narrow escape of
+being rejected; for the would-be donor, unrecognized, and wearing
+shabby clothes, was ill received by Sir William Boxall, the then
+Director, and was all but sent away with contumely, with his picture,
+till he made it and himself known:
+
+     "My name is Wallace," said the stranger quietly, "Sir
+     Richard Wallace; and I came to offer this picture to the
+     National Gallery." "I nearly fainted," said Boxall when he
+     told the story.... "I had nearly refused _The Peace of
+     Muenster_, one of the wonders of the world!"
+
+Nevertheless, the little scene is in its way truly typical of the
+nation's treatment of its would-be benefactors!
+
+The story of the foundation of the British Museum, the classic edifice
+in Bloomsbury that has arisen on the site of the old historic Montague
+House, is not unlike that of Hertford House. For, the first beginnings
+of the enormous museum collections originated very much in the same
+manner as the Hertford Bequest. Sir Hans Sloane, the Sir Richard
+Wallace of his day, Chelsea magnate, physician, naturalist, and
+philanthropist, determined his large library collections to the
+nation, offering them by his will, at a fourth of their estimated
+value; desiring, like Sir Richard, that, if possible, the collections
+should remain in his house,--Henry VIII.'s historic Chelsea
+manor-house. This wish, however, was not in his case carried out; the
+ancient building was demolished, and, in its stead, the British Museum
+was founded.
+
+At the British Museum the lady-lecturer, with her tribe of earnest
+students, is occasionally also to be met with. Here she is often
+youthful and attractive, and is generally to be found,--strange
+contrast of associations!--either in the Mausoleum Room, or among the
+Elgin Marbles: her little band of eager pupils scribbling in their
+note-books at a respectful distance. Last March I saw a charming,
+Hypatia-like lady, tall and fair, gray-eyed and gray-robed, holding
+thus her little court, by the lovely figure of Demeter; I would fain
+have joined myself to the small gathering, and posed as a pupil, but
+that my courage failed.... I felt, however, glad to think that, in
+this case, the study of Art had not, as some declare, tended to make
+the young lady regardless either of her appearance or of
+neatly-fitting tailor-made clothes. But she went on with her following
+to the Nereid's Tomb, and I saw her no more.
+
+In the long galleries of the British Museum is generally to be found a
+motley gathering of visitors, in which the poor, and the children of
+the poor, largely predominate. Rows of chattering little girls in
+pinafores, corresponding batches of little boys in knickerbockers,
+greet one at every turn. And the more ragged the children, the more
+astonishingly erudite and profound are sometimes their utterances.
+This is a surprising testimony to the efficacy of the Board Schools,
+as well as to the advance of learning generally. The visitor who "lies
+low" and listens, in any of the Greek Marble Rooms, will often find
+cause to marvel at youthful and ragged intelligence. Girls are more
+flippant, perhaps, than boys: "'Ere's the Wenus," one will say: "you
+can always tell 'er, 'cos she seems to be lookin' around and sayin':
+'Ain't I pretty'?" Yet, though to hear unkempt and neglected waifs
+talking wisely about Greek marbles does, I must confess, puzzle me, I
+must, in fairness, own that there appears to be another side to the
+question, and that the officials on guard appear to entertain no very
+high views as to juvenile erudition. "So far as I've noticed," a
+kindly British Museum policeman once said to me, "the street children
+don't get much real good out of going to the Museum. They bring a lot
+of dirt out of the streets in with them, their fingers are generally
+sticky, and they look about 'em--oh, yes! but not usually with any
+object, just vacantly."
+
+This was depressing. (Did the accompanying dirt, I wondered, at all
+affect this particular policeman's outlook?) "But I saw a small crowd
+of boys and girls looking hard at the King Alfred documents and
+missals," I murmured.
+
+"Oh, and so you might have done; but didn't you notice," said the
+stern guardian of the law, "that a lot of ladies and gentlemen had
+been lookin' at 'em just before? They wouldn't have troubled about 'em
+without that.... And King Alfred's all the thing now.... Children
+always come, like bees, where other people are lookin'; and try and
+squeeze the older folks out just to see what they've been a-lookin'
+at.... Yes," he owned, in reply to my incredulous interjection, "the
+children might have _heard_ the name of Alfred in their history books,
+but no more; _that_ wouldn't be the cause of their crowding up. Their
+mothers often send 'em into the Museum when they want to go out
+themselves, or perhaps just to get rid of 'em for a time. Children are
+more indulged, and not half so well-behaved, as I was when I was a
+boy."
+
+But the chatter of the children is stilled, or, at any rate, lost
+among the vast marbles of the collection, where so many sounds mix and
+mingle in a soothing aloofness. Here, in the long galleries, where the
+faint light, "that kind of light," as Rossetti said, "that London
+takes the day to be," slants down on Roman bust and Greek god, may
+sometimes be heard charitable ladies explaining to dirty little
+street-arabs the influence of Phidias on Early Italian sculpture; or
+one of the elegant Hypatia-like girl-lecturers already described,
+discourses, while a motley crowd of pupils:
+
+  --"school-foundations in the act
+  Of holiday, three files compact--"
+
+--draw near to listen.... And who can tell where the grain may fall?
+
+Sunday is now the great "People's Day" at the British Museum. Those
+who cavil at "Sunday opening" should really visit the Museum then,
+when, from two till four, the galleries are dotted with intelligent
+sightseers. (For the Museum, be it noted, is not so often used as a
+mere shelter from rain, "jes' to pass the toime away," or as the
+"refreshment-room" already referred to, as it used to be.) Perhaps the
+greatest crowd is to be found upstairs, where the mummy-room is
+greatly beloved, both of small boys and of honey-mooning couples.
+Young couples, I notice, either in the "courting" or newly-married
+stage, have ever a strong affinity for mummies;--and as to boys!...
+While you are, perchance, reflecting over the decaying embroideries of
+a mummy-case, and wondering what was the life and fate of its
+once-lovely occupant, after the manner of Sir Edwin Arnold:
+
+  "Tiny slippers of gold and green!
+   Tied with a mouldering golden cord!
+   What pretty feet you must have been
+   When Caesar Augustus was Egypt's lord'--
+
+"'Ere, look 'ere, Jimmy," one of those demon boys will break in,
+interrupting your reverie: "you can see the corpse's 'ole fice! My!
+ain't 'e jes' black! Blimy if 'e aint 'ad 'is nose bruk in a fight, as
+'e ain't got but the 'alf of it left," &c., &c.
+
+"See wot this lydy's got wrote on 'er, 'Arry," the blooming betrothed
+of a speechless young man will strike in, unconsciously carrying on
+the chorus: "Three thieusand years old! My! 'ow-ever could they a kep'
+'er all that time! She's a bit orf colour, certingly--but sich _good_
+clothes to bury 'er in--I call it nothin' but sinful waste," &c., &c.
+
+Yet I can tell a more touching story, in another sort, of the Mummy
+Room. Once I happened to watch a small boy--a very decidedly "earthly"
+small boy, too; one would not have expected it of him--on whom the
+mummies seemed to exercise a quite indescribable fascination. He even
+stopped half-way through his stale Museum bun, and gazed at them with
+a species of horror. Then, after a five-minutes' silence, he breathed
+hard, and said to his companion, in an awe-struck whisper:
+
+"They don't know we're looking at them!"
+
+The "Jewel Room" is another favourite haunt. Here only some twenty
+people are allowed in at one time, and the policemen are doubly
+reinforced; and indeed, since the accident to the Portland Vase, it is
+certainly a necessary precaution. This beautiful vase, lent in 1810 by
+the Duke of Portland, was smashed by a semi-lunatic in 1845. This
+man, suddenly and without motive, deliberately aimed a brick at it,
+and crashed it into fragments, from which it has been cleverly
+restored as we see it at present.
+
+People who find the British Museum exhausting--and they are many--take
+too much of it at one time. It is therefore small wonder that they
+often suffer from a kind of mental indigestion--"Museum headache" it
+has been appropriately termed. A pretty young girl complained to me of
+just such a headache the other day: "I wanted," she said, "to go to
+"Niagara," but _T--_ insisted on taking me to that dreadful Museum
+instead, and I had to walk past rows and rows of awful headless things
+for two hours!" Poor thing! But many people share her feelings without
+possessing her frankness. And to walk through the long, gloomy
+galleries of the Museum without due object, preparation, or intention,
+is, no doubt, exhausting. It is true that we are there "heirs of all
+the ages," but it is equally true that nobody can satisfactorily
+inherit all the ages at one and the same time. If we content ourselves
+with but one department for the day, it is wonderful how interested we
+may become. Mr. Grant Allen--who, by the way, was generally unkind
+about London, must have experienced the boredom that comes with a
+mental surfeit.
+
+     "The British Museum" (he says) "is indeed a place to despair
+     in--or else to saunter through carelessly with a glance
+     right and left at what happens to catch your eye or take
+     your fancy. I must add" (he continues unpleasantly), "that a
+     certain blight of inexplicable shabbiness hangs somehow over
+     the vast collection; whether it is the gloom of Bloomsbury,
+     the want of space in the galleries, the haphazard mode of
+     acquisition, or what, I know not; but certainly, for some
+     mysterious reason, the objects here exhibited are far less
+     interesting, relatively to their intrinsic scientific and
+     artistic worth, than those of the Louvre, the Vatican, the
+     Munich galleries, or any other great European museum.
+     Dinginess and stinginess are everywhere conspicuous."
+
+Mr. Grant Allen was, evidently, a West Ender. And as he elsewhere
+calls St. Paul's "bare, pretentious, and unimpressive," and London
+generally "a squalid village," we need the less mind his calling the
+British Museum "a gloomy and depressed looking building." He had
+evidently never seen the pillared portico shining in the May sun, its
+flocks of pretty pigeons feeding on the green plots that line the
+enclosure, and the lately-planted young plane-trees bursting into
+vivid green,--a new "boulevard" along its outer line of railings.
+
+Mr. Allen was, of course, thinking of the more romantic surroundings
+of foreign galleries, housed in ancient palaces, with all the
+adornments of parquet, mosaic, and often tropical gardens. There is,
+however, a faint glimmer of truth in what he says. We in London have
+not the consummate art of the foreigner in the arrangement and
+setting-off of beautiful objects. In the Louvre, for instance, all the
+galleries lead to a final star, shining through the long vista of
+space,--the Venus of Milo; in the Vatican, all the noble
+_chefs-d'oeuvre_ glimmer in alcoves round a central fountain. Here, in
+our Museum, _per contra_, you seem rather to be in a Gallery of
+Instruction. It is not only in shops that we in England have to learn
+how to "dress our windows." But at any rate, no one will deny that we
+have of late made enormous advances in the art.
+
+Nevertheless, the beauty and grandeur of the British Museum
+collections, beauty on which I have already touched in the Bloomsbury
+chapter, impress us in spite of fog, and grime, and dull London
+galleries. And the feeling for the suitable arrangement and disposal
+of our artistic treasures grows upon our directors year by year. Thus,
+the gigantic figure of Mausolus, as he stands driving his triumphal
+car, a wonder of the world, is effectively placed; and though it is
+but seldom light enough to view the Assyrian Bull-gods thoroughly in
+their dark corner, they form, doubtless, an imposing entrance to the
+old Greek marbles. The Egyptian Hall is also impressive, and the
+enormous scarab, called irreverently by an American visitor, "about
+the biggest bug in Europe," is advantageously placed, as also that
+Grammar of Hieroglyphic, the "Rosetta Stone."
+
+[Illustration: _At the Royal Academy._]
+
+The collection of Tanagra figurines, on the upper floor, near the
+Jewel Room, is one of the most interesting departments in the Museum.
+Here, in a small compass, you may follow the whole development of the
+plastic art, from the rudest clay effigies and caricatures, to the
+most lovely realisation of the Greek feeling for beauty. Some of the
+ladies, with their palm-leaf fans and "Liberty" draperies, seem hardly
+to come to us from the tomb; have we not met and loved them in our own
+day? Their dresses, their attitudes, are so modern, even their hair is
+arranged in the present styles. Especially charming are two damsels in
+tea-gowns, leaning earnestly towards one another, enjoying some choice
+bit of gossip. And there are two figures in this particular gallery,
+in which I claim to take a quite special interest; having seen them,
+so to speak, in their transition stage. It happened thus: When I was
+in Athens some few years back, a waiter, taking us no doubt for "rich
+English milors," said, in a stage whisper, that he had some fine
+things to dispose of. He kept them, he said, for safety in the cellar.
+So to the cellar he went, and produced, from many wrappings of
+cotton-wool, the treasures:--that very winged Eros and that same
+pirouetting ballet-dancer that now adorn one of the central
+wall-cases. Alas, in our case, that waiter was doomed to
+disappointment. He wanted no less than L40 for the Eros and L30 for
+the ballet dancer; and they were returned to their cotton-wool and to
+the cellar. But, a twelvemonth passed, and behold! one fine day we
+recognised with joy our old friends in the familiar surroundings of
+the British Museum!
+
+Many of the British Museum treasures have, like that winged Eros,
+endured strange vicissitudes of fortune. The great "Elgin"
+marbles,--those sculptures from the Parthenon so long furiously raged
+over in print on the much-vexed charge of vandalism in appropriation,
+and still more furiously threatened by the rage of the sea on their
+transit from the Acropolis,--were, indeed, shipwrecked on their way
+here. Then there are the contents of the "Mausoleum" Room, the whole
+story of the discovery of which, by Sir Charles Newton at
+Halicarnassus, in 1856 is like one long romance. Other objects recall
+various stories. The familiar bust called "Clytie," for instance, so
+admired by Carlyle, and so familiar in drawing schools, was the most
+cherished possession of Mr. Townley, who "escaped with it in his arms
+when he was expecting his house to be sacked during the Gordon riots."
+"Fortunately," says the chronicler, "the attack did not take place,
+and Mr. Townley's wife, as he called her, returned to her companions."
+The corridors of the British Museum, that suggest such boredom to the
+uninitiated, are full of such stories. So much we know, but, ah! if
+these stones could only tell their histories, and let the full light
+into their chequered past!
+
+The South Kensington Museum, now officially, by order of the late
+Queen, termed "the Victoria and Albert Museum," is well known to all
+dwellers in, and visitors to, London. The large and wonderful
+collections that it contains have been for many years so overcrowded
+and so irregularly arranged, as to lose half their attraction. For
+long it existed partly in shanties and temporary buildings, and a
+hideous iron structure, nicknamed the "Brompton Boilers," was for long
+the disgrace of a rich and a beauty-loving nation. All these have at
+length been swept away; the terribly inadequate main entrance (in the
+Brompton Road) is being done away with, and a new facade is rising,
+which will soon effect great changes and improvements. Mr. Ruskin, who
+was always a victim of moods, was apparently in his day made very
+cross by the general muddle, and expressed his feelings on the subject
+in the following burst of pathetic eloquence:
+
+     "At South Kensington" (he says), "where I lost myself in a
+     Cretan labyrinth of military ironmongery, advertisements of
+     spring blinds, model fish-farming, and plaster bathing
+     nymphs with a year's smut on the noses of them; and had to
+     put myself in charge of a policeman to get out again."
+
+Indeed, in its vast size, its involved construction, and its
+encyclopaedic scope, the South Kensington Museum much resembles a
+maze, and, once inside it, it is difficult indeed to know the points
+of the compass. Yet, everything can be seen here, if only you know
+where to look for it. It is, itself, a "General Exhibition" on no mean
+scale. And here is more than ever exemplified the great truth, that
+the most beautiful objects lose in effect in proportion to the
+unsuitableness of their immediate surroundings. Even the model of the
+Pisan pulpit, crowded as it is among so many incongruous objects,
+seems here a sort of glorified stove-pipe, while the carved front of
+Sir Paul Pindar's old house almost suggests a magnified dolls'-house
+awaiting sale, and plaster casts jostle on all sides with the valuable
+treasures of antiquity. Here again are the groups of feminine students
+with their guides, and also many isolated toilers, "working up" some
+special branch of knowledge in the different sections, such as
+Ivories, Porcelain, Lace, Musical Instruments, or Italian woodwork.
+(The students are here, I may add, a trifle better dressed than those
+at the British Museum; they are also, on an average, a thought
+cleaner, and their hair has, perhaps, a tendency to be neater.) The
+"omnium-gatherum," as it has been called, of South Kensington, should,
+like any other Exhibition, be taken piecemeal, and on the first visit
+the stranger should merely try, if possible, to see the historic
+Raphael cartoons, and those most interesting pictures of the British
+School that form the famous "Sheepshanks" collection.
+
+The neighbouring Natural History Museum, Waterhouse's vast edifice of
+terra-cotta, is, internally, a most beautifully planned building, and
+the arrangement of its various classes of specimens is no less
+excellent. Nothing could be better done, either for purposes of
+entertainment or of instruction, than the groups in the Great Hall of
+the building, where animals, birds, and insects, are shown charmingly
+mounted and in their own natural surroundings; and where, by careful
+and well-selected illustration, such strange living mysteries as
+"melanism" and "albinism" are demonstrated and explained. One of the
+most striking glass cases of all is that which illustrates "Protective
+Resemblances and Mimicry," a subject which is attracting much notice
+at the present day among naturalists (see the late Professor Henry
+Drummond's _Tropical Africa_ for further curious information on this
+interesting subject). Some of the strange natural imitations shown
+here, such as of dead leaves by butterflies, or of bits of straw by
+insects, are wonderful indeed.
+
+The new Tate Gallery, raised by the munificence of one of our merchant
+princes for the enshrinement of modern British Art, is a building of
+quite another kind. This edifice, in the Greek style, was built by the
+late Sir Henry Tate, on the site of old Millbank Prison, at
+Westminster. When this Gallery was first opened, in July, 1897, its
+approaches were always thronged by private carriages, and powdered
+footmen waited in the muddy, half-finished roads (for the whole
+locality was then in a state of incompleteness). But this was in the
+early days of its fame; the vagaries of fashion are of short duration,
+and although even yet "smart" people are to be met with occasionally
+in the Tate Gallery, they are now in a decided minority; they have,
+most likely, betaken themselves to the still newer exhibition of
+Hertford House.
+
+It is the artisan, the small shopkeeper, the great "lower
+middle-class," that frequent chiefly the Tate Gallery. Not by any
+means the same class, for instance, that you see at the National
+Gallery; the visitors to the Tate Gallery are mainly the lovers of
+"the human interest" in a picture, and not the earnest students. Here
+the sightseers roam, like butterflies, from flower to flower; not so
+much to gather the honey, as just to enjoy the moment. Therefore, at
+Millbank, they are but rarely gowned in angular "art serge," and are
+but seldom be-spectacled and be-catalogued. Neither are the
+Hypatia-like girl-lecturers at all evident. Sir Henry Tate used to
+take an evident pleasure in walking about the galleries that his
+munificence had provided. Only a short time before his death, he was
+to be seen there, benevolent and urbane as ever, the type of what Mr.
+Ruskin has called "the entirely honest merchant."
+
+The Tate Gallery is considered, administratively, as part of the
+National Gallery; and many pictures of the modern British school have,
+as every one knows, been removed to Millbank from the older
+collection. But the earlier pictures of the British School, and the
+Turners, are still in Trafalgar Square.
+
+The wealth of foreign pictures now to be seen in the National Gallery
+of London renders it the Mecca of every visitor, both from our own
+country, and from overseas. The National Gallery, fine as it is, is
+but a comparatively modern growth. Founded in 1824 by the purchase of
+the Angerstein Collection, it slowly, very slowly at first, crept into
+fame and distinction. Only some forty-five years ago, Mr. Ruskin said
+of it that it was "an European jest!" Since 1887 its pictures have
+nearly doubled in number and it is now, if not one of the finest, at
+least one of the most representative, collections in the world. The
+internal arrangement of the Gallery leaves little to be desired, and
+its spacious entrance hall and staircase, adorned with coloured
+marbles, has a solid dignity, with a cheerfulness and brightness
+usually somewhat lacking in London. A fine bust of Egyptian porphyry,
+called the "Dying Alexander," (a copy of one in the Uffizi), presented
+by Mr. Henry Yates Thompson, forms an effective centre-piece for the
+Entrance Vestibule.
+
+Once inside the magic portals of the National Gallery, a very paradise
+is opened to the art-loving visitor. He will soon forget, revelling in
+those soft Italian skies, that glowing southern colour, that outside
+his shelter hums the London of the twentieth century. The pictures are
+finely arranged, and they are not crowded. A hint has been taken from
+the Louvre, and the famous "Blenheim Raphael," the _Ansidei Madonna_
+(bought by the nation for such a tremendous price from the Duke of
+Marlborough), greets the entering visitor from the far end of a long
+vista. The walls on which the pictures are hung are covered in
+Pompeian red or sober green, with a wall-covering that has the
+soothing effect of rich Venetian brocade, and that even improves in
+tone with years.
+
+[Illustration: _Recruiting Serjeants by the National Gallery._]
+
+The National Gallery cannot be seen in one visit. For any real
+appreciation of the vast collections, ten, twenty visits rather are
+needed; visits that need never, now, be other than a pleasure; the
+improved conditions making the place itself attractive, and whatever
+light is obtainable in London finding its way to those large and lofty
+galleries. The mass of "the People" mainly frequent the British
+Schools; and, even in the larger portion of the building occupied by
+the Foreign Schools, every room has usually, like the London
+collections generally, its special votaries. For instance, in the
+little room devoted to the Early Sienese painters, you will nearly
+always find a few earnest students, making pencil marks on note-books
+or in elaborate catalogues; in the long Italian Gallery they are,
+perhaps, just a trifle less severe, but are still more or less of the
+same type, sitting in rapt contemplation and still with catalogues;
+but the Dutch School is already more flippant, and but few catalogues
+survive into the Spanish and French Schools.
+
+The romance of the National Gallery,--what volumes might not be
+written on the fascinating subject! If, here again, old pictures could
+tell stories of their past, what adventures could they not relate! The
+long corridors of the National Gallery, filled with masterpieces from
+all nations and ages, would of themselves furnish as copious records
+as many a shelf in the British Museum Library. What stories might
+these pictures tell: of their painting, their owners, the generations
+to which they have served as the Lares and Penates, the families whose
+vicissitudes they have shared! This, maybe, had hung for years,
+blackened and tarnished, in a pawnbroker's shop till some vigilant eye
+rescued it from its oblivion; that, perhaps, had saved its owner's
+life, or redeemed the fortunes of a nation. This, again, formed the
+"wedding-chest" of a beautiful dark-eyed bride, dust long ago; that
+caused the imprisonment, almost the death, of its author. Unhappily,
+old pictures are "silent witnesses" of history. We can, indeed,
+discover, through much searching in dusty archives, the _provenance_
+of a few of our most celebrated pictures, or read, perhaps, one or two
+of the stories relating to them; but how many are there of which we
+have not been able to find a record? It depends mainly on chance what
+stories survive, and what do not. Then, such as are known are often
+not widely known; they lie hidden, for the most part, in musty
+blue-books, or in tomes of ancient lore, attainable by the student
+only. The mere title, _The Cornfield_ or _The Repose_, tells so
+little. Does it not add to our interest in the pictures to know that
+the one was thought by Constable to be his best work, and that the
+scene of the other was laid among the hills of Titian's own country?
+In connection with the inscriptions on the frames, most visitors, I
+fancy, will share the disappointment I felt, when on revisiting the
+Gallery one day I found the familiar "Raphael" disguised as "Sanzio,"
+"Tintoret," as "Robusti" and so forth; but this somewhat pedantic
+innovation has now been partially remedied.
+
+The early Italian pictures were usually painted to adorn particular
+places; some, perhaps, to decorate a wooden chest for the furnishing
+of a room, as Benozzo Gozzoli's _Rape of Helen_; others to consecrate
+an altar, as Raphael's _Madonna_; many to assist in the carrying out
+of some architectural design, as in Crivelli's pictures, or Fra
+Filippo Lippi's _Vision of St. Bernard_. All, at any rate, were
+painted, not to hang in rows in a gallery, but for particular persons,
+places, and occasions, far removed from the present environment of
+them. Perhaps our only pictures specially painted with a view to the
+Gallery which they now adorn, are those in which Turner's rivalry with
+Claude is immortalised. Visitors may wonder why, in a room devoted to
+the French School of Painting, they are suddenly confronted with two
+large canvases of Turner's. The fact is that Turner painted them in
+direct competition with Claude. The great modern landscape-painter
+determined to beat the ancient on his own classical ground. Whether he
+has conquered is indeed a question; but the pictures still hang side
+by side in unconscious rivalry, telling the pathetic story of the dead
+man's ambition. Turner, who left these two pictures, among many
+others, to the nation, expressly stipulated that they should hang
+between those two by Claude. In vain, during his life, large sums were
+offered for them; he steadily refused to sell. "What in the world,
+Turner, are you going to do with it?" his friend Chantrey asked,
+referring to the _Carthage_. "Be buried in it," Turner replied grimly,
+keeping its real destination a secret.
+
+There are in the National Gallery some pictures actually painted for
+the sitters to be buried in. These are the early Graeco-Egyptian
+portraits, which glare down upon us in the vestibule. A few years ago
+a workman's spade, digging in the Fayoum, accidentally struck against
+a mummy-case. Affixed to the outside covering, in a position
+corresponding to the head of the corpse, was a portrait of a man in
+his habit as he lived. That "find" led to others. Some dozen tombs,
+closed 1,500 years ago, were rifled in order to supply a fresh link in
+the historical development of art as exhibited in our National
+Gallery.
+
+Just above these old-world pagans hangs Spinello Aretino's _Fall of
+the Rebel Angels_, with devils and dragons galore. If you gaze at the
+mummy faces long enough, you can quite imagine the dead men's faces
+looking at you; as Spinello, who was an imaginative Florentine, used
+to think his devils did. Spinello's picture was painted to decorate
+the church of Sta. Maria degli Angeli, in his native town of Arezzo;
+and he laboured hard to make the chief fiend, Lucifer, as hideous as
+possible. So much did this idea prey upon him, that one night he had a
+terrible dream. The demon he had painted appeared to him in his sleep,
+demanding to know why the painter had made him so ugly. Spinello, it
+is said, did not survive the shock, which is a warning to those who
+take liberties with the devil. The Greek painter, who, when confronted
+with an unpleasing sitter, said frankly, "Paint you? Who would paint
+you, when no one would even look at you?" was wiser.
+
+Seeing the pictures in the National Gallery is like reading bits of
+old biographies. All true artists put their life into their work, and
+leave it there. Take Marco Marziale's work--_The Circumcision of
+Christ_ (No. 803)--it is wonderful in respect of the faithful labour
+put into things that the modern painter would generalise as mere
+accessories. An amateur embroideress could easily copy the elaborate
+cross-stitch of Marziale's lectern border, and find no stitch in its
+wrong place. He who did this was only a second-rate Venetian painter,
+and a label painted on the canvas fixes the date and makes it probable
+that this was his first important commission; therefore, Marco spared
+no trouble, and crowded his picture with all the most beautiful
+textures and patterns known to the Venice of his day. People did not
+scamp work in those times.
+
+The painter-poet, William Blake, with his charming insanity, has left
+us glimpses of his strangely warped mind in his mysterious painting of
+_Pitt Guiding Behemoth_, which hangs on the walls in another part of
+the gallery. The more one looks at this little picture, the more its
+green and gold hues and the tongues of its flames have fascination. It
+is dark and unattractive at a first glance: but, to show how fatally
+easy it is to attract a "following," and also how much in need the
+average visitor is of a pilot to the Gallery, one only has to draw up
+a chair and seat one's self before this small canvas to collect an
+inquisitive crowd. People, even educated people, are strangely
+imitative! Besides this picture, there are only one or two minor works
+by Blake in our National Gallery. Instead of his _Canterbury
+Pilgrims_, we have here that of his contemporary Stothard, who took
+the idea from Blake and supplanted him. Stothard's _Canterbury
+Pilgrims_ caused a quarrel between himself and Blake; a quarrel which
+was never healed; and Blake criticised his rival's painting freely on
+its exhibition. Hoppner, the artist, praised it; adding that Stothard
+had "contrived to give a value to a common scene, and very ordinary
+forms." Thereupon Blake, in criticising the critic, said that this was
+Hoppner's only just observation; "for it is so, and very wretchedly so
+indeed. The scene of Mr. S.'s picture," he adds, "is by Dulwich hills,
+which is not the way to Canterbury; but perhaps the painter thought he
+would give them a ride round about, because they were a burlesque set
+of scarecrows, not worth any man's respect or care." _Tantaene animis
+caelestibus irae?_
+
+Among the works of the Lombard School is a picture by Parmigiano, _The
+Vision of St. Jerome_ (No. 33), which shows how the artist can forget
+himself in his work. For Parmigiano was engaged on this very picture,
+in Rome, during the German sack of the city in 1527. Vasari says that
+the painter was so intent on his work that, even while his own
+dwelling was filled with the German invaders, he continued
+undisturbed; and that when they arrived in his room and found him so
+employed they stood amazed at the beautiful paintings, and wisely
+permitted him to continue. Parmigiano's picture is thus, in the truest
+sense, historical.
+
+There is another class of pictures that is associated with incidents
+in history. First, we have that priceless little painting by Gerard
+Terburg, _The Peace of Muenster_ (896), mentioned before in connection
+with Hertford House. It hangs in the Dutch Room, and is so small that
+one might easily overlook it. Small as it is, it cost at its last sale
+L8,800; L24 for every square inch of canvas. The Dutch painter has
+represented one of the turning-points of his country's history; the
+ratification, in 1684, of the Treaty of Muenster, by which the long war
+between Spain and the United Provinces was ended. The numerous heads
+are all portraits, and, in the background, the painter has introduced
+himself. There is about this painting a photographic truth, a minute
+fidelity, which makes it doubly interesting. Terburg would not part
+with it during his life. Afterwards, amid many vicissitudes, it passed
+into the possession of Prince Talleyrand, and was actually hanging in
+the room of his hotel, under the view of the Allied Sovereigns, at the
+signing of the Treaty of 1814. Not less interesting in its way is the
+painting by Holbein of the Duchess Christina of Denmark. Among
+Holbein's duties, as Court painter and favourite of Henry VIII., was
+that of taking the portraits of the ladies whom the King proposed to
+wed. This young Christina was prime favourite after the death of Jane
+Seymour, and Holbein was despatched to Brussels to paint her. The
+picture pleased his Majesty; but, for political reasons, the match was
+broken off. The story of Christina's message to the King, that she had
+but one head, but that if she "had two one should be at the service of
+his Majesty," is now discredited; but the Duchess seems to have had a
+character of her own.
+
+_Peace and War_, by Rubens, an allegorical canvas (46), is another
+picture designed to sway the fate of nations. Rubens painted it when
+he came over to England, in 1630, as ambassador to negotiate a peace
+with Spain. He produced an elaborate allegory showing forth the
+Blessings of Peace, and presented it, with much diplomacy, to Charles
+I. It was sold, after the King's death, for L100; to be bought back
+again for L3,000. With regard to Charles I.'s pictures generally, much
+might be said of the strange irony of history. The large equestrian
+picture of the King by Vandyck (1172), bought for the nation at the
+Blenheim sale for L17,000, was, after his death, sold by Parliament,
+for a paltry sum; and Correggio's famous _Mercury, Venus, and Cupid_,
+(10), also included in Charles's collection, was sold and bought again
+by successive Parliaments.
+
+Among the early Florentine pictures in the Gallery, Botticelli's
+_Nativity of Christ_ (1034), is history in the sense of showing the
+force of the religious revival in Savonarola's time. Botticelli, at
+the age of forty, fell under the preacher's influence, and, forsaking
+the world's pleasures, made a "mourner" of himself until his death.
+This is the picture that, as Mr. Lang says, was:
+
+  "Wrought in the troublous times of Italy
+   By Sandro Botticelli, when for fear
+   Of that last judgment, and last day drawn near,
+   To end all labour and all revelry,
+   He wept and prayed in silence."
+
+The painting is full of theological symbolism, and its Greek
+inscription, being translated, runs: "This, I, Alexander, painted at
+the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, in the half-time
+after the time during the fulfilment of the eleventh of St. John, in
+the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing of the Devil for
+three years and a half. Afterwards he shall be chained, and we shall
+see him trodden down, as in this picture." Botticelli had already,
+earlier in life, got into religious trouble by his reforming
+tendencies. When quite a young man, he had painted, for a Florentine
+citizen, Matteo Palmieri, a large picture called _The Assumption of
+the Virgin_, which also hangs in our Gallery (No. 1126). Palmieri had
+adopted Origen's strange heresy that the human race was an incarnation
+of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither for God
+nor for his enemies; and, as he and Botticelli, in working out the
+design of the picture, had made amendments in theology, they fell into
+disgrace. Suspected of heresy, Botticelli's work was covered up; and
+the chapel for which it had been painted was closed until the picture
+left Florence for the Duke of Hamilton's collection and was bought by
+the nation in 1882. "The story of the heresy interprets," Mr. Pater
+says, "much of the peculiar sentiment with which Botticelli infuses
+his profane and sacred persons, neither all human nor all divine."
+
+Most interesting, too, is Carpaccio's Venetian painting of the Doge
+Giovanni Mocenigo (750), which faithfully represents a page of the
+history of Venice. The doge is shown kneeling before the Virgin, and
+begging her protection, on the occasion of the plague in 1478.
+Medicaments and nostrums against the epidemic are contained in a gold
+vase on the altar before the throne; and a blessing (according to the
+inscription below) is asked on them: "Celestial Virgin, preserve the
+City and Republic of Venice, and the Venetian State, and extend your
+protection to me, if I deserve it." Simple and modest indeed was
+Venice in the good days of her prosperity! Compare with this kneeling,
+crownless doge, the new and elaborate frescoes in the Vatican, where
+the Pope is represented in his grandest robes, benevolently granting
+to the Madonna an audience, with masters of the ceremonies standing
+by, and obsequious pages holding his gold-laced train.
+
+Some of the greatest ornaments of our Gallery are those which have
+been thrown off easily in the magnanimity of art. Chief of these is
+the Veronese called _The Family of Darius_ (294). This large painting,
+with its splendid architecture, gem-like colour, and wonderful
+composition, was painted while Veronese was detained by an accident at
+the Pisani Villa at Este. Having left it behind him there, he sent
+word that he had left wherewithal to defray the expense of his
+entertainment; and his words were more than verified. The picture,
+whose golden tones Smetham, the artist, so much admired, turned really
+to gold afterwards. The Pisani family sold it to the National Gallery,
+in 1857, for L13,650. Veronese's lavishness in giving away his
+masterpieces was almost equalled, however, by our own Gainsborough,
+who gave his _Parish Clerk_ (760) to a carrier who had conveyed his
+pictures from Bath to the Royal Academy.
+
+The wanderings and vicissitudes of celebrated pictures have been many
+indeed. The celebrated Van Eyck, _Jan Arnolfini and his Wife_ (186),
+painted five hundred years ago, has had, for instance, an eventful
+history. At one time a barber-surgeon at Bruges presented it to the
+Queen Regent of the Netherlands, who valued it so highly that she
+pensioned him in consideration of the gift. At another, it must have
+passed again into humbler hands; for General Hay found it in the room
+at Brussels to which he was taken in 1815 to recover from the battle
+of Waterloo. The story of Michael Angelo's _Entombment_ is also
+curious. It was once in the gallery of Cardinal Fesch, which was sold
+and dispersed after the cardinal's death. Being in a neglected
+condition and unfinished it attracted little attention, and was bought
+very cheaply by Mr. Macpherson, a Scotchman sojourning in Rome. After
+the dirt had been removed, it was submitted to competent judges, who
+pronounced it to be by Michael Angelo. This caused a great sensation;
+and a lawsuit was instituted against Mr. Macpherson for the recovery
+of the picture, a suit which ultimately ended in his favour. He
+removed the picture to England, and sold it to the National Gallery
+for L2,000.
+
+The pictures that were the favourites of great men gain an
+additional value in our eyes from that fact. Vandyck's _Portrait of
+Rubens_ (49), Bassano's _Good Samaritan_ (277), and Bourdon's
+_Return of the Ark_ (64), were all owned and much-prized by Sir
+Joshua Reynolds, who would often admire, to his Academy pupils, the
+"poetical style" of the Bourdon. Vandyck himself singled out the
+_Portrait of Gevartius_ as his masterpiece, and used to "carry it
+about from court to court and from patron to patron, to show what he
+could do as a portrait-painter." There is, too, a pretty story of
+how Sir George Beaumont valued a little landscape by Claude (61), so
+highly that he made it his travelling companion. He presented it to
+the National Gallery in 1826; but, unable to bear its loss, begged
+it back for the rest of his life. He took it with him into the
+country; and on his death two years later, his widow restored it to
+the nation.
+
+I might go on multiplying picture-stories for ever; for the romance of
+the National Gallery is inexhaustible. Times, and men, change; we live
+our little day, and are gone; but here, upon our walls, live souls
+embodied in canvases, monuments of human spirits which from age to age
+are still instinct with life. "Paul Veronese," James Smetham writes,
+"three hundred years ago, painted that bright Alexander, with his
+handsome flushed Venetian face, and that glowing uniform of the
+Venetian general which he wears; and before him, on their knees, he
+set those golden ladies, who are pleading in pink and violet; and
+there is he, and there are they in our National Gallery; he, flushed
+and handsome, they, golden and suppliant as ever. It takes an oldish
+man to remember the comet of 1811. Who remembers Paul Veronese, nine
+generations since? But not a tint of his thoughts is unfixed; they
+beam along the walls as fresh as ever. Saint Nicholas stoops to the
+Angelic Coronation, and the solemn fiddling of the Marriage at Cana is
+heard along the silent galleries of the Louvre ('Heard melodies are
+sweet, but those unheard are sweeter')! yes; and will be so when you
+and I have cleaned our last palette, and, 'in the darkness over us,
+the four-handed mole shall scrape.'"
+
+Paul Veronese and his contemporaries knew how to make their works
+last. We in our day are not so fortunate. It is sad to think how many
+pictures of our own English School are gradually fading away; how many
+men have put their best powers into pictures which are now (among them
+some of Sir Joshua Reynolds's most beautiful creations) rapidly
+becoming "ghosts of ghosts." With Turner the general wreck is more
+complete. "Turner," Constable said, "seems to paint with tinted
+steam,--so evanescent, and so airy." Alas! evanescent indeed. Reynolds
+devoted much time and attention to finding out durable pigments.
+Trying to discover the secret, he even cut up some old Italian
+pictures. It was a vain quest. The old masters are long ago buried,
+and they have carried their secret to the grave.
+
+Sadder still is the case of those artists whose pictures themselves
+have not faded, but the fashion for whose pictures has gone. Sir
+Benjamin West, who died some sixty odd years ago, enjoyed very great
+fame during his life. He painted many large historical canvases, all
+painstaking, and, in their way, of undoubted merit. They gained high
+prices in their day, and are now mostly consigned either to cellars or
+to the darkest rooms of suburban galleries.
+
+Time is, after all, the greatest of art critics, and its judgment is
+sure. The best of all the centuries adorns the walls of the National
+Museum. It is the best only that survives. To us, in all our painful
+twentieth-century newness, it is given to inherit the mystery and
+magic of the old Greeks and Egyptians; the charming imagery of
+Raphael, filled with simple faith and sweet imagination; the quaint
+beauty of Botticelli, and of the early Florentines, whose art was a
+part of their life; the gay voluptuousness of the later Venetians;
+"the courtly Spanish grace" of Velasquez; the charming affectations of
+Sir Joshua Reynolds, shown in the fair ladies whose portraits, in
+their beauty, once filled the halls of England. All is given to us,
+unsparingly. For us and for the enrichment of the walls of our
+National Gallery, did the rude barbarians, in the sack of Italian
+cities, stay the hand of destruction; for us the treasures of art were
+wrested from many a palace of antiquity; it was for the delight of
+thousands of modern Londoners that the monasteries of the Middle Ages
+were plundered. Altar-pieces painted for adoration in the private
+chapel of some patron saint are now seen dimly, through London fog and
+smoke, hanging, maybe, next to some pagan _Bacchus and Ariadne_, or
+_Venus and the Loves_. For our sake were battles fought, to include
+masterpieces among the spoils; for us did the Italian nobles sell
+their treasures into the hands of money-lenders. Could Botticelli,
+that fervent follower of Savonarola, he who "worked and prayed in
+silence," have guessed that his beloved _Nativity of Christ_ would,
+centuries hence, be removed to barbarous London, and be stared at by
+crowds of wondering Philistines, who should see in it only the curious
+uncouthness of its gestures,--he would, surely, have held his hand.
+
+The National Gallery is the natural haunt of such dreams. Sitting
+there in the quickly-growing twilight, how easily it becomes peopled
+with ghosts, ghosts even more intangible than Reynolds's. Our thoughts
+wander back into the past, the walls grow dim, they seem to melt away
+into distance; we hear the sound of music, and see the glimmer of gay
+banners, as Cimabue's Madonna is carried past, amid the acclamation of
+a multitude; or a gay court appears before our eyes, filled with fine
+ladies, grandees, and inquisitors; and, apart from all, a great King
+conversing eagerly with a little dark painter, whose only ornament,
+beyond his lace ruffles, is the red cross of the Order of Santiago on
+his breast; or we seem to be in Italy, in a poetic "Romeo and Juliet"
+time and atmosphere, in a rich noble's house, bright with splendid
+hangings and works of art; a painted wedding-chest, or _cassone_, has
+just been presented, on the occasion of a marriage, and the young
+bride herself gazes down lovingly into its depths, which she has just
+stored with rich silks and brocaded velvets, and all her treasures;
+just such a chest as Ginevra might have hid and perished in; just such
+a bride as Ginevra herself. Or the scene changes again to a dusty
+gallery in a dingy street, with a little ugly old man mounted high on
+a stool, painting furiously away amid a horde of tailless cats; and
+anon a transformation, and we see a brilliant illumination of Queen
+Mab's Grotto, with fairies in wonderful gondolas, gliding to and fro;
+a ball in Venice.... We, too, are invited, but, as we hesitate to
+trust ourselves to Turner's airy structures, a voice sounds in our
+ear,--a prosaic voice, however: "Closin' time, ma'am, closin' time!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+HISTORIC HOUSES AND THEIR TENANTS
+
+     "I have seen various places ... which have been rendered
+     interesting by great men and their works; ... I seem to have
+     made friends with them in their own houses; to have walked
+     and talked, and suffered and enjoyed with them.... Even in
+     London I find the principle hold good in me.... I once had
+     duties to perform which kept me out late at night, and
+     severely taxed my health and spirits. My path lay through a
+     neighbourhood in which Dryden lived; and though nothing
+     could be more commonplace, and I used to be tired to the
+     heart and soul of me, I never hesitated to go a little out
+     of my way purely that I might pass through Gerrard Street,
+     and so give myself the shadow of a pleasant
+     thought."--_Leigh Hunt._
+
+     "Our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
+     natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure
+     of it. There is a shellfish which builds all manner of
+     smaller shell into the walls of its own. A house is never a
+     home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred
+     lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and
+     you can tell what the occupant is."--_Oliver Wendell
+     Holmes._
+
+
+[Illustration: _At the Club._]
+
+The most curious thing about London houses, and especially
+characteristic of our national reserve, is the fact that we can, as a
+rule, tell nothing at all about them until we get inside the sacred
+enclosure. A Londoner's house is the shell that hides him from the
+world; our houses are, to the foreigner, as enigmatic and as exclusive
+as we ourselves. But, once past the magic gateway, once past the
+Cerberus at the door, you come upon an interior often unguessed and
+undreamed of. The contrast is striking. What can be more dully
+monotonous, more unromantic, than the row of brick and stucco
+house-fronts that face the average large square or street? Yet it is
+ten to one that, inside, hardly one of these will exactly resemble the
+other, either in taste, architecture, or even general plan. Even the
+"long unlovely street" of Tennyson's disapproval may, and does, often
+hide unsuspected treasures. Who, for instance, would suspect the
+existence of the Greek bas-reliefs, the painted ceilings, the
+colonnades and statues in some of the old Bloomsbury houses? Who would
+imagine the curious "Soane Museum" in the quiet house in Lincoln's Inn
+Fields? the dignified Georgian spaciousness in the old mansions of
+Bedford Square? the gorgeous interior of the sombre houses of Bruton
+Street? the picture-galleries of Piccadilly and Mayfair? or the
+Eastern magnificence and opulence of some of the Park Lane mansions?
+For in London, as a rule, there are but few external signs to denote
+wealth. Even in our riches, we do not wear our heart on our sleeve.
+From a survey of these, as a rule, unimposing facades, we can imagine
+the uninitiated foreigner wondering where in the world the people of
+the richest city in the universe live. He may, even if intelligent,
+wander at large through London, and notice nothing of beauty, or even
+of interest. Was it not Madame de Stael who, lodged as she was in
+uninspiring Argyll Street, said unkindly, but not, perhaps, without
+some reason, with regard to her immediate surroundings that "London
+was a province in brick"? But London houses have other and deeper
+associations than those of mere riches; the association with mighty
+spirits of the past, poets dead and gone, great men of action, kings,
+warriors, statesmen; the infinite multitude of those who, "being dead,
+yet live." And in some cases, even though the houses themselves have
+vanished, yet the places where they stood are still sacred.
+Thus,--though it is perhaps difficult to define the exact boundaries
+of the old Stuart Palace of Whitehall, or to say where was the special
+site of the historic Cockpit,--yet, do they not lend a glory and an
+attraction to all the district of Westminster? Do not the purlieus of
+the unromantic Borough High Street, murky as these often are, recall
+Chaucer's famous Tabard Inn, of Canterbury pilgrims' fame? and does
+not the much-abused Griffin, on its Temple Bar pedestal, memorialise
+the older and too obstructive arch, where of old the dreadful heads of
+political scapegoats were displayed?
+
+Vanished, and every year still vanishing, treasures! Sooner or later,
+no doubt, the edifices made sacred by history and association must go
+the way of all brick and masonry; yet even such landmarks as Turner's
+poor riverside cottage at Chelsea, or Carlyle's modest abode in Cheyne
+Walk, it will be sad to part with. That curious humanity that Charles
+Dickens gave to houses makes itself again felt in their fall;
+dwellings are not immortal, any more than were their great occupants.
+There is no picturesque decay in London; what is not of use must go:
+it dare not cumber the precious ground. Therefore, the few remaining
+timbered fronts of London are gone or going; only recently some
+picturesque old red-roofed houses, in the close vicinity of New Oxford
+Street, were condemned and destroyed; Staple Inn, indeed, has been
+saved and patched up, owing to the prompt action of a band of public
+benefactors. Blocks of houses, forming whole streets, are continually
+washed away in the tide of progress; Parliament Street has
+disappeared; the old Hanway Street, as it once was, has lately gone;
+Holywell Street is of the past; the demolition of this latter, though,
+indeed, urgently needed for the widening of the "straits" of the
+Strand, was not without its special sadness. The decay of houses that
+are at once picturesque and historical is, of course, doubly
+afflicting; yet even ugly houses often retain the charm of association
+to those who know what memories are bound up with them. Here romance
+and history serve to lend the beauty that is lacking. Thus, Ruskin's
+prosaic home in Hunter Street, Thackeray's commonplace mansion in
+Onslow Square; the house in Half Moon Street where Shelley sat "like a
+young lady's lark," in a projecting window, "hanging outside for air
+and song;" even that dark corner in Mecklenburgh Square where Sala
+kept his curios and bric-a-brac, all have their peculiar charm. Dr.
+Johnson's house in Gough Square, Fleet Street; the so-called "Old
+Curiosity Shop" in Lincoln's Inn Fields; John Hunter's house in
+Leicester Square--are all threatened with demolition. And, even apart
+from historic interest, how sad is the frequent fall of London's old
+landmarks! Tottering buildings, mere derelicts of time, old houses----
+
+          "whose ancient casements stare,
+  With sad, dim eyes, at the departing years."
+
+Instinct as they are with the pathos of humanity, the sword of
+Damocles hangs over them all.
+
+If great men's houses, or the houses that great men have ever,
+temporarily, lived in, could all be designated by some unobtrusive
+memorial tablet, such, for instance, as the Carlyle bas relief at
+Chelsea,--or even a plain inscription such as those recently placed on
+John Ruskin's birthplace in Hunter Street, Reynolds's house in
+Leicester Square, and Sir Isaac Newton's in St. Martin's Street,--what
+an interest would it not lend to even "long and unlovely" London
+streets! For the romance of houses is not divined by instinct; and
+even the taste of a Morris or a Rossetti has not always left its mark
+on their London abodes. That Dickens, Thackeray, John Leech, Darwin,
+the Rossettis, William Morris, have all lived in and about Bloomsbury,
+is not patent to the casual visitor. Does not even the plain
+inscription, "Poeta Inglese, Shelly," (_sic_) lend an added glamour to
+the Lung' Arno of Pisa?
+
+The dividing line between history and fiction is not always very
+strongly marked; and this leads us to consider yet another aspect of
+the question. A curious literary interest sometimes attaches to
+certain houses, an interest hardly less deep for being partly, or even
+purely, fictitious. Among the many novelists who have made themselves
+responsible for this, none, perhaps, have been more prominent than
+Charles Dickens. Dickens, whose knowledge of London was, like his own
+Sam Weller's, "extensive and peculiar," has invested certain houses,
+certain localities, with an almost human sentiment and pathos.
+Thackeray has also done much, yet not so much as his contemporary,
+towards making London stones famous. The tenants of "historic houses"
+in this sense--houses on whom these and other writers have conferred
+immortality--are, of course, merely the "ghosts of ghosts," and yet,
+how real, how persistent are they, with the majority of us! Harry
+Warrington enjoying the May sun from his pleasant window in Bond
+Street; old Colonel Newcome kneeling among the "Grey Friars" of the
+Charterhouse; the pretty old house and garden in Church Street,
+Kensington, where Miss Thackeray's charming heroine, Dolly, lived;
+little David Copperfield at the waterside blacking warehouse; poor
+weeping Nancy on the steps of Surrey Pier, by London Bridge; ragged Jo
+at the grating of the squalid burying-ground: they and their sorrows
+are more real, more vivid, to us than the actual sufferings of the boy
+Chatterton, the "Titanic" agony of spoiled Byron, or the short glories
+of Lady Jane Grey. And, indeed, when we call to mind the gay vision of
+the "ladies of St. James's" taking the air, we think as much of such
+personages as Thackeray's beautiful Beatrix, wayward and heartless,
+and of her solemn cousin, Colonel Esmond,--as of Mrs. Pepys, in her
+noted "tabby suit," or of my Lady Castlemaine herself, in all her
+beauty, attended by her royal admirer.
+
+Such are the "byways of fiction" in London! Next to Dickens, in
+whose persuasive company we have wandered from Fact to Fiction, Dr.
+Johnson is, perhaps, of all our great Londoners, the most prominent.
+To him, indeed, the everlasting noise and bustle of the capital,
+"the roaring of the loom of time," was ever dear. Sayings of his
+about London have, in many cases, almost passed into household
+words: "He who is tired of London is tired of existence"; "Sir, let
+us take a walk into Fleet Street"; "I think the full tide of
+existence is at Charing Cross." Dr. Johnson had a great admiration
+for Fleet Street, which he thought finer than anything he knew. The
+old doctor's well-known figure, so often painted, in the ancient
+full-bottomed wig, and rusty clothes, yet, for us, haunts the shades
+of the Strand, yet lingers near his old haunts, fumbling in the
+displayed stores of the second-hand book shops. "The old philosopher
+is still among us, in the brown coat and the metal buttons."
+Johnson's London houses,--Gough Square, Bolt Court, Johnson's Court,
+and many others; Johnson's favourite Fleet Street taverns, notably
+the famous "Cheshire Cheese," with its well-known literary coterie;
+these are almost too familiar to need description; they, and the
+Johnsonian element they recall, are bound up intimately with
+London's eighteenth-century history. There is scarcely any street
+so little altered, since then, in its characteristics, as Fleet
+Street. And if the Fleet Street of our own day, with its still
+irregular houses, its occasional glimpses, down some alley, of the
+shining river which it skirts, is picturesque,--what must it have
+been in Johnson's day, when its shops yet displayed their gay
+projecting signs? when "timbered fronts" and gables were the rule;
+when the charming dress of the day, with its gay satins and ruffles,
+knee breeches and buckles, was the mode? Though, for that matter,
+the old doctor himself, the essential spirit of the Fleet Street of
+the time, can hardly have been a fashionable figure:
+
+     "It must be confessed," says Boswell, "that his ... morning
+     dress was sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes
+     looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled,
+     unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt
+     neck and the knees of his breeches were loose, his black
+     worsted stockings ill drawn up, and he had a pair of
+     unbuckled shoes by way of slippers."
+
+Doctor Johnson was, indeed, a faithful Londoner. He lived in no less
+than sixteen London houses (among them, several "Inns"), all situated
+in and around Holborn and the Strand. Nearly all of these abodes have
+now disappeared, or are unidentified; only the Gough Square house
+still exists. It is picturesque, chiefly on account of its age; it
+stands back out of Fleet Street, in a little court, and has been often
+sketched. It is a corner house, numbered seventeen (marked by a
+tablet), and remains, in externals at least, much as Johnson left it
+140 years ago, though internally it is a network of dusty offices.
+Johnson's Court (not named from him), where he also lived, is now
+swallowed up in "Anderton's Hotel." In Gough Square the greater part
+of the celebrated Dictionary was written; here Johnson's wife died,
+and here he "had an upper room fitted up like a counting-house in
+which he gave to the copyists their several tasks." It was, however,
+in Bolt Court, his last house, that the curious army of pensioners
+lived whom this strange old scholar-philanthropist collected round
+him:
+
+[Illustration: _Wych Street._]
+
+     "His strange household of fretful and disappointed
+     alms-people seems as well known as our own. At the head of
+     these pensioners was the daughter of a Welsh doctor (a blind
+     old lady named Williams), who had written some trivial
+     poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, her
+     daughter, and a Miss Carmichael. The relationships of these
+     fretful and quarrelsome old dames Dr. Johnson has himself
+     sketched, in a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Thrale: 'Williams
+     hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love
+     Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss Carmichael)
+     loves none of them."
+
+These old waifs and strays were not, apparently, even always grateful.
+But, in any case, the annoyance of "such a menagerie of singular
+oddities" must have driven him more and more to his clubs, and
+especially to his favourite haunt the "Cheshire Cheese." This ancient
+tavern, still existing in its pristine simplicity in Wine Office
+Court, "and," says Hare, "the most perfect old tavern in London," is
+the classic retreat where Johnson and Goldsmith held their court;
+Johnson in the window-seat, and Goldsmith on his right hand. To
+American tourists, I gather, it is a specially sacred place of
+pilgrimage. In that low, dark, sanded parlour of the "Cheshire
+Cheese," you might easily imagine yourself in some rural retreat,
+miles away from London, though so close in fact to the din and
+civilisation of Fleet Street. Not only far from London, but far away
+back in the eighteenth century. Can such things be, you wonder, in the
+London of our day? You sit in Johnson's time-honoured seat, under his
+brass-plate inscription, and his picture; darkened oak panelling lines
+the walls; artistic Bohemians blow smoke-wreaths over their toasted
+cheese and whiskies, hilariously in yonder corner; and even the
+waiters are not of the uncommunicative, cut-and-dried modern sort, but
+rather the cheery, jovial order of Dickens's time. One of them brings
+you the "visitors' book"; two ponderous tomes filled with brilliant
+sketches by well-known artists, some of the sketches amiably
+suggestive of the sketchers having supped "not wisely, but too well";
+another tells you, with all the pride of long association, that "the
+place has not changed one whit since Johnson's time"; and yet a third,
+with an expansiveness rare indeed in London, will point out to you
+"Goldsmith's favourite window-seat."
+
+Oliver Goldsmith, the erratic genius who "wrote like an angel, and
+talked like poor Poll," was one of Johnson's satellites, another
+shining light of old Fleet Street. He had the artistic temperament
+indeed, for when he was not in the clutches of the bailiffs, he was
+usually revelling in absurd extravagance. Goldsmith's last lodging, in
+No. 2, Brick Court, Temple, he furnished with ridiculous lavishness,
+dressing himself to match, in "Tyrian-bloom satin with gold buttons."
+Dr. Johnson must sometimes have been tried by his friend, as the
+following story shows: (Newbery, Goldsmith's publisher, had apparently
+refused further advances to his impecunious client):
+
+     "I received one morning" (Boswell represents Johnson to have
+     said), "a message from poor Goldsmith, that he was in great
+     distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me,
+     begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent
+     him a guinea and promised to come to him directly. I
+     accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that
+     his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was
+     in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already
+     changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a
+     glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he
+     would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by
+     which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a
+     novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked
+     into it and saw its merits, told the landlady I should soon
+     return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for L60. I
+     brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not
+     without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used
+     him so ill."
+
+The MS. was that of _The Vicar of Wakefield_, but the whole picture
+really suggests a scene from Dickens's _Pickwick_. Oliver Goldsmith
+acted at one time as "reader"--curious combination!--to prim old
+Samuel Richardson, the printer-novelist, at the latter's
+printing-office in the south west corner of Salisbury Square,
+communicating with the court, No. 76, Fleet Street. Richardson, also,
+had once befriended Johnson, and the worthy doctor was for ever
+praising his friend, and abusing his compeer in fiction, Henry
+Fielding, whom he called "a barren rascal."
+
+     "Sir" (said Johnson), "there is more knowledge of the heart
+     in one letter of Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_." Some
+     one present here remarked that Richardson was very tedious.
+     "Why, Sir," replied Johnson, "if you were to read Richardson
+     for the story, your impatience would be so great that you
+     would hang yourself. But you must read him for the
+     sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to
+     the sentiment."
+
+But if Richardson is tedious, Johnson was nothing if not prejudiced;
+though, after all, he has no less a person than Macaulay on his side;
+Macaulay, who declared that were he to be wrecked on a desert island
+with only one book, he would choose _Clarissa_, sentiment and all, for
+his sole delectation.
+
+Hogarth, the painter, it is said, once met Johnson at Richardson's
+printing-office; when, seeing "a person standing in the room shaking
+his head and rolling himself about in a ridiculous manner, he
+concluded he was an idiot, whom his relations had put under the care
+of Mr. Richardson as a very good man.... To his great surprise,
+however, this figure stalked forward to where he was, and all at once
+burst into an invective against George II.... Hogarth looked at him in
+astonishment, and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the
+moment inspired."
+
+Richardson's own home was, however, at some distance from his Fleet
+Street printing-office; as far, indeed, as North End, Fulham. His
+house there, which still stands, is one of two named "The Grange";
+that nearest the Hammersmith Road. Here, in his garden-house, the
+novelist wrote his somewhat long-winded romances, indulged his amiable
+vanity, and indited his letters, with their touches of playfully
+elephantine wit, to "Lady Bradshaigh" and his other fair
+correspondents.
+
+It is this very house, "The Grange," old-fashioned, red-brick,
+sedate, that, by another of Fate's curious ironies, was for
+twenty-seven years the home and studio of Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
+Strange contrast, indeed, between the prosy, fussy, precise old
+painter-novelist, and the most ideal and imaginative of our modern
+painters!
+
+     "When the painter first settled here, the house stood in the
+     midst of fields on the outskirts of London. Now, whole rows
+     of new streets have sprung up on every side, the fields are
+     built over, and omnibuses and district trains have their
+     stations within a stone's throw. But the leafy trees and
+     sheltered garden of the painter's house remain, a green
+     oasis in the sandy waste. From the noise and dust of crowded
+     thoroughfares we step into the quiet garden with its shady
+     lawns and gay flower borders, its fine old mulberry-tree and
+     rows of limes. Here snowdrops and crocuses blossom in the
+     early spring, and later in the year, blue irises and white
+     lilies, sunflowers and hollyhocks grow tall under the ivied
+     wall. And here, at the end of the garden, among the flowers
+     and leaves, is the studio where the master worked."
+
+Here, then, in the historic "garden-house," where Richardson once
+wrote, and received his friends Hogarth and Johnson, was Burne-Jones's
+studio, where he imagined that
+
+      "land of clear colours and stories
+  In a region of shadowless hours,"
+
+described by Swinburne the poet in the lovely dedication of his poems
+to his friend and Master in another art, begging that they may find
+place, "for the love of lost loves and lost times," in the painter's
+created paradise; "Receive," he cries,
+
+      "in your palace of painting
+  This revel of rhymes."
+
+It is a far cry from Fleet Street to Fulham, whither we have wandered
+in company of Richardson and his friends, and we must retrace our
+steps. All these sages and worthies of Fleet Street were, of course,
+more or less connected with the great engine of the Press, then
+comparatively in its childhood, but now, though grown to mighty
+dimensions, occupying still the same sacred and classic ground. The
+Jupiters of the Press have from the first wielded their sceptres in
+Fleet Street and its immediate neighbourhood. And not only the
+newspaper press, but all sorts of lampoons, political skits, libellous
+pamphlets, and the like, had here their home in early days. Here that
+meteoric and unstable wit, Theodore Hook, devoted his misapplied
+genius to the editing of the then scurrilous journal _John Bull_, (a
+paper whose _metier_ was the satirising of society); his favourite and
+thoughtful axiom being "that there was always a concealed wound in
+every family, and the point was to strike exactly at the source of
+pain." The primary object of the paper, which was started in
+"Johnson's Court" in 1820, was the slandering of the unfortunate Queen
+Caroline, wife of George IV. The death of the Queen soon reforming the
+_John Bull_, it altered to dulness, and declined in sale; its first
+editor is, indeed, now mainly remembered by one of his early
+escapades, the famous "Berners Street hoax." This was a wild practical
+joke played on a harmless widow lady, living at 54, Berners Street.
+Hook, it seems, had made a bet that "in one week that nice quiet
+dwelling should be the most famous in all London;" and, the bet being
+taken, he forthwith wrote many hundred letters to tradesmen, ordering
+goods and visits of every kind, from coals to cranberry tarts, from
+attorneys to popular preachers. The street became, of course,
+absolutely blocked with traffic, Hook himself enjoying the "midday
+melodrama" from an apartment he had himself hired in a house opposite.
+Such wholesale destruction was the result that the _enfant terrible_,
+being suspected, had to sham illness, until the affair had blown over.
+
+Theodore Hook was a Londoner of the Londoners, with "a gigantic
+intellect and no morals," added to the peculiar resourcefulness and
+adaptability of the typical cockney. Nevertheless, even this
+unprincipled buffoon and wit, petted by royalty and fashion, and left
+to die, a drunken worn-out spendthrift at last--must, he, too, have
+had his bad moments. There is a peculiar and haunting horror attaching
+to the story (told in his _Life and Letters_), of how, when passing
+by his birthplace in Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, Hook pointed to a
+spot nearly opposite the house where he was born, saying, "There by
+that lamp-post stood Martha the Gypsy."
+
+The Strand, still picturesque, narrow, and tortuous, is now nearly
+entirely given up to shops, newspaper offices and theatres; but at No.
+149 (once a lodging-house and now a newspaper office), the actress
+Mrs. Siddons stayed when she first came up to London, and here she
+supped joyfully with her father and husband, to celebrate her first
+London success. Less changed is the historic Temple, where that
+constant Londoner, Charles Lamb, lived so long, and of which he has
+left us such lovely descriptions. Indeed, Charles Lamb is one of those
+Londoners of whom, like Dickens, Milton, and Johnson, it is difficult
+to say where they have _not_ lived in the great metropolis. Milton,
+perhaps, is, however, an extreme case: for he not only lived in a
+score of different residences, but further puzzles the conscientious
+topographer by being married in three different churches and buried
+piecemeal; having been also disinterred at various times, and his
+remains scattered,--a thing manifestly unfair to the future historian.
+
+Ruskin, also, the latter-day apostle and critic, has been very
+catholic in his London dwellings. Born in humble Hunter Street,
+Bloomsbury, he migrated later with his parents to Herne Hill and
+Denmark Hill, with a short interlude of married life in Park Street.
+The Denmark Hill house, so far from the centre of things as to be
+almost suburban, is yet a goal of pilgrimage to Ruskin's faithful
+disciples. Denmark Hill, now so overbuilt, so lined and scored with
+railways, was, some sixty years ago, still a very desirable
+residential region. Does not Thackeray locate his Misses Dobbin,
+Amelia's Major's sisters, there?--in that fine villa, too, with
+"beautiful graperies and peach-trees," which delighted little Georgy
+Osborne. The smaller house on Herne Hill, where little John Ruskin
+spent his boyhood, is at the present day unattractive enough; but the
+Denmark Hill villa near by, taken later when the family launched out,
+has still its charm. It, too, is a "fine villa," or rather country
+mansion, not unlike the description of the Misses Dobbin's abode, and,
+like it, full of peach-trees that, growing on old walls, still bear
+abundantly. Readers of _Praeterita_ will remember how, when Mr. Ruskin
+became "of age, and B.A., and so on," his father and mother decided on
+moving that short way to the larger house; and how "everybody said how
+wise and proper"; and how "the view from the breakfast-room into the
+field was really very lovely"; and how the family lived for some
+quarter of a century here in much "stateliness of civic domicile."
+
+     "The house itself" (says Mr. Ruskin) "had every good in it,
+     except nearness to a stream, that could with any reason be
+     coveted by modest mortals. It stood in command of seven
+     acres of healthy ground ... half of it in meadow sloping to
+     the sunrise, the rest prudently and pleasantly divided into
+     an upper and lower kitchen garden; a fruitful bit of
+     orchard, and chance inlets and outlets of woodwalk, opening
+     to the sunny path by the field, which was gladdened on its
+     other side in springtime by flushes of almond and double
+     peach blossom. Scarce all the hyacinths and heath of
+     Brantwood redeem the loss of these to me; and when the
+     summer winds have wrecked the wreaths of our wild roses, I
+     am apt to think sorrowfully of the trailings and climbings
+     of deep purple convolvulus which bloomed full every autumn
+     morning round the trunks of the apple trees in the kitchen
+     garden."
+
+That hedge of almond blossom is still gay in spring, and the "shabby
+tide of progress" has not touched the old house, which, garden, field,
+orchard and all, is still virtually the same as it was in Ruskin's
+time. No. 163, Denmark Hill, is its designation;--a big, roomy,
+detached mansion, a real "rus in urbe." Much like other large suburban
+villas, the house itself; yet this is the spot whence emanated _Modern
+Painters_, that early work of genius that assured the young writer's
+fame. There is the "study" that Mr. Ruskin used, his "workroom above
+the breakfast-room"; there, above it again, is his bedroom, looking
+straight south-east, giving "command of the morning clouds,
+inestimable for its aid in all healthy thought." There, still, is the
+little reservoir made by Mr. Ruskin in engineering zeal, a canal said
+by the neighbours to have cost L5 every time he had it filled, in vain
+attempt to make a little rivulet, or Alpine sluice, for watering! For,
+although "of age and a B.A.," the chief reason, as Mr. Ruskin
+ingenuously confesses, why his soul yearned for the Denmark Hill
+house, was, that "ever since I could drive a spade, I had wanted to
+dig a canal, and make locks on it, like Harry in "Harry and Lucy." And
+in the field at the back of the Denmark Hill house I saw my way to a
+canal with any number of locks down to Dulwich." ... "But," he adds
+sorrowfully, "I never got my canal dug, after all! The gardeners
+wanted all the water for the greenhouse. I resigned myself ... yet the
+bewitching idea never went out of my head, and some waterworks were
+verily set aflowing twenty years afterwards."
+
+Yet, be the actual bricks and mortar never so prosaic, there is a
+strange fascination about the dwellings where great men have lived and
+died. Benjamin Disraeli was born, like Ruskin, in the shades of
+Bloomsbury, and, again like him, migrated, later, to Mayfair on his
+marriage. The late Lord Beaconsfield remained, however, always
+faithful to the West End. In his Park Lane house (No. 29) he lived
+over thirty years; removing then to No. 2, Whitehall Gardens, and
+finally dying, after a short tenancy, at 19, Curzon Street. It was a
+cold and inclement spring, a blast of Kingsley's much belauded
+"north-easter," to which he succumbed. That unassuming house in Curzon
+Street was, for the moment, the world's centre. "It was half-past six
+in the morning that the final bulletin of the dying statesman's
+condition was placed on the railings to inform the crowd who, even at
+that early hour, waited for intelligence."
+
+Mr. Gladstone, too, has had as many London houses as his great rival,
+with perhaps, stormier residences in them. There is the house, for
+instance, in Harley Street, where the mob smashed the great man's
+windows at the time of his unpopularity over the Eastern question.
+And No. 10, Carlton House Terrace, is the mansion where he lived for
+so many years at the zenith of his fame. Is his spirit, I wonder,
+clean vanished, forgotten there, and does no record of him remain?
+Perhaps the militant spirits of Disraeli and Gladstone still linger,
+if anywhere, about Downing Street; that narrow street of which Carlyle
+says that "it is evident to all men that the interests of one hundred
+and fifty millions of us depend on the mysterious industry there
+carried on"; and where No. 10, that dingy old house which has been the
+temporary home of successive Prime Ministers, as well as the official
+head-quarters of the Government, "focuses more historic glamour than
+any other house in London." Hook said wittily of Downing Street:
+
+     "There is a fascination in the air of this little
+     _cul-de-sac_; an hour's inhalation of its atmosphere affects
+     some men with giddiness, others with blindness, and very
+     frequently with the most oblivious boastfulness."
+
+Lord Rosebery used 10, Downing Street, for official purposes; Lord
+Salisbury did not use it at all. Many historic scenes have been
+enacted, and many momentous questions settled, within its walls. It
+was in its entrance hall, trodden by the feet of successive
+generations of politicians, that Wellington and Nelson met for the
+only time in their lives, both waiting to see the Minister, and
+neither knowing who the other was. They naturally entered into
+conversation, but it was not until afterwards that they knew to whom
+they had been speaking. The house itself is solid and substantial,
+without any architectural attractiveness, and to the casual observer
+suggests nothing different from thousands of other London dwellings.
+From the outside, no one would imagine it to be commodious, but it has
+some very large apartments; and the old council chamber, the principal
+features of which are the book-lined walls, massive pillars, and
+heavy, solid furniture, remains much as it was in Walpole's day. Here
+many conferences of Ministers have been held, and the most delicate
+affairs of State settled. The Cabinet Councils have, however, not
+always been held here. Mr. Gladstone preferred to hold them in his own
+more cosy room on the floor above; and Lord Salisbury preferred to
+hold them at the Foreign Office. Next door is the official residence
+of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The entrance to the Foreign Office
+and the Colonial Office is opposite. Which of these great buildings,
+with their numerous passages and annexes and waiting-rooms, is the
+original of Dickens's "Circumlocution Office," it would be invidious
+even to attempt to discover.
+
+Nowhere is the curious unexpectedness of London houses better
+exemplified than in the building known as Sir John Soane's Museum, on
+the north side of the square called Lincoln's Inn Fields. Here to all
+seeming, stands an ordinary dwelling-house;--its front, it is true,
+somewhat of the ornate kind,--but utterly misleading, so far as its
+outer appearance is concerned, to the passer-by. Nor does the illusion
+stop at the hall-door. For there is here an air of homely
+friendliness, of quiet welcome, that is altogether at variance with
+any preconceived ideas that the visitor may have formed about museums
+in general. Several dignified family servants of irreproachable
+demeanour lie in wait for the stranger and kindly escort him round. It
+is not till you have passed the Rubicon of the double dining-room, yet
+arranged exactly as in the lifetime of the founder, that you begin to
+realise that you are in a museum, not in a private mansion. And the
+realisation is even then difficult, for the family butlers have a
+familiar way of alluding to "Sir John," the donor, as though he were
+alive and in the next room, thus:
+
+"Sir John gave L140 for these Hogarths," says the Chief Butler,
+indicating the well-known _Rake_ series, and speaking with a degree of
+intimacy of "Sir John" that positively startled me, till I remembered
+that the gentleman in question died some sixty years ago.
+
+"Oh, er, very Hogarthian!" I remark somewhat bashfully, for indeed
+the pictures are hardly all of them pleasing to the uninitiated. "I
+wonder that Sir John could like to live with them!"
+
+"Yes, indeed! some of them _are_ very gross," says the Mentor; and I
+almost wish that I had held my peace.
+
+The panels of the mysterious room that contains the Hogarths afford a
+wonderful example of how to hang many pictures in a limited space.
+They open at the touch of a spring, disclosing not only inner walls of
+pictures, but also their own inner sides similarly adorned. Through
+the walls thus magically opened a glimpse is obtained of a little
+basement room called "The Monk's Parloir," adorned with carving and
+statuary. Sir John Soane was, of course, the architect of the existing
+Bank of England, and interesting architectural drawings, beside
+innumerable imaginary palaces by him, abound in the museum. The chief
+treasure of the collection, the hieroglyphic-covered alabaster
+sarcophagus of Seti I., father of the great Rameses, lies in the
+basement; which is, indeed, entirely filled with works of "antiquity
+and virtue"; the "backs" and basements of three adjoining houses being
+utilised for the required space. To judge from the wide variety among
+the objects collected, Sir John Soane must have been a man of
+cosmopolitan tastes, and possessed of an interesting personality.
+Perhaps he found some comfort in art for the tragedies of his later
+life; for his two sons (whose quaint portraits, in youthful blue and
+silver, are to be seen in the museum) died in his lifetime. At any
+rate, that Sir John was a man of some humour seems to be sufficiently
+attested by the curious _post-mortem_ joke that he perpetrated on his
+trustees! For, when leaving his treasures to the nation, and
+specifying especially that the house was to be left precisely as he
+had lived in it, he appended to his will three codicils, directing
+that three mysterious sealed cupboards in his museum-house should not
+be opened till respectively thirty, fifty, and sixty years after his
+death! This was accordingly done, expectation rising higher in each
+decade; and lo! on each occasion nothing was found but a few worthless
+papers, relating either to antiquated accounts, or to still more
+antiquated family disagreements!
+
+There is, at the present time, despite the encroachments of a modern
+and generally iconoclastic London, now a wholesome spirit of
+veneration abroad, which tends not only towards the preservation of
+ancient and historical buildings, but also towards the acquisition of
+the homes that have been lived in and made beautiful by the celebrated
+men of our own day. Of this kind is "Leighton House," bought since
+Lord Leighton's death by the effort of a private committee, and now
+opened free to the nation. The rooms and internal arrangement are, as
+in the case of the "Carlyle House," left as nearly as possible in
+their original condition, and though of necessity much of the valuable
+furniture and accessories have been removed, yet the many sketches and
+drawings illustrative of the painter's life-work that fill the walls
+do something to dispel the unavoidable sense of incompleteness. It is
+interesting to wander through the beautifully-proportioned rooms, to
+gaze into the well-tended, sun-lit garden, with its gay geranium beds
+and its green lawn; to sit in the mysterious semi-darkness of the
+"Arab Hall," and look up into its gold-encrusted dome; to listen to
+the mournful splash of the tiny fountain in its marble basin;--and
+yet, "wanting is--what?"
+
+  "When the lamp is shattered
+   The light in the dust lies dead."
+
+It will always be a question how far the mere dwelling of a great
+painter is worth thus preserving in its integrity, when once the magic
+of his presence, his genius, has deserted it, and the growing work of
+his art no longer adorns its walls. The committee of the "Leighton
+House" have done their work with judgment and care, and, if the
+inevitable comparison occurs to those who saw it in the life time or
+during the "show days" of its late master, of former life and
+splendour with present gloom and sadness, this is only in the nature
+of things. The blue tiles that the painter loved still adorn, in
+bird-of-paradise like splendour, the wide, massive staircase; the
+water still tinkles in the Pompeian atrium as of old; and the master's
+art can still be studied in the many drawings and reproductions that
+fill, so far as they can, the places left by greater works.
+
+Hertford House, in Manchester Square, the sumptuous home of the
+Wallace collection, bequeathed to the nation by Lady Wallace in 1898,
+is the most important of the nation's artistic legacies. Though in a
+sense historic--for it is the "Gaunt House" of _Vanity Fair_, and its
+former owner, Lord Hertford, was caricatured as the Marquis of
+Steyne;--yet, as it is mainly as a picture gallery that it must be
+noticed, it has fallen most conveniently into a previous chapter.
+
+But the historical houses of London are innumerable, and my space is
+but limited. History is written in many kinds. And the greater portion
+of the fine houses of the metropolis, the palaces of Mayfair, Pall
+Mall, Kensington, possess historic interest of their own; interest,
+indeed, often unknown and unsuspected by any but the privileged few,
+because unvisited and generally inaccessible. Of these are
+Chesterfield House, in South Audley Street, the home of the author of
+the famous _Letters_, where the poor scholar Johnson waited patiently
+for interviews with his noble patron; Apsley House,--the pillared
+facade of which is so well known to travellers on the humble omnibus
+as it passes Hyde Park Corner,--the abode of the "Iron Duke," that old
+man in the blue coat and white trousers, to the last the people's
+idol, whose daily appearances, in old age, were here awaited patiently
+by expectant crowds; Lansdowne House, Devonshire House, Sutherland
+House, Bridgewater House, splendid mansions on or near the "Green
+Park," famed, like so many others, for their picture galleries;
+Sutherland House, often now hospitably thrown open for gatherings of
+"the people," is said to be the finest private mansion in London: "I
+have come," a Queen is reported to have said to a former Duchess of
+Sutherland, "from my house to your palace."
+
+Many of the splendid old mansions of Stuart times have, indeed, gone;
+yet in some instances they have risen again from their ashes to new
+spheres of interest. Thus, old Montague House in Bloomsbury, old
+Burlington House in Piccadilly, old Somerset House in the Strand, have
+been rebuilt and utilised by Government as National Collections or
+offices. Where lovely ladies of the Restoration trailed their sheeny
+silks in Lely-like voluptuousness, where court gallants presented
+odes, and court dandies took snuff and patronage, now sweet girl
+graduates pace the galleries, spectacled lady-students copy "old
+masters," Academy pupils study "the antique." The contrast is
+picturesque as well as strange. Does one not sometimes, as twilight
+falls, seem to hear the ghostly "swish" of the court beauties' dresses
+along a deserted British Museum Gallery, or seem to see in a stone
+Venus, with uplifted arm, an insufficiently clad fair lady of the
+olden time? It is but fancy, yet such is the charm of history and of
+historic association.
+
+Ghosts of our own fancy may, and do, wander at their will in London's
+misty galleries; but ghosts, better authenticated, are popularly
+supposed to haunt a few of London's old houses. Thus, No. 50, in
+Berkeley Square has gained undesirable notoriety as the "Haunted
+House," and many extraordinary tales have from time to time been told
+as to its ghostly manifestations. Berkeley Square has, undeniably, a
+solid and old-time look that fits in well with the gloomy tradition;
+it has the best and most ancient plane-trees of any London square, and
+its fine old iron-work, with occasional torch-extinguishers (used by
+the "link-boys" of sedan chairs in Stuart times), are all in keeping
+with the old-world spirit. Nevertheless, Berkeley Square has other and
+sadder associations than those of mere ghosts. For in No. 45,--a house
+specially noted for its iron-adornments,--the great Lord Clive,
+founder of the British Empire in India, committed suicide in 1774. "In
+the awful close," says Macaulay, "of so much prosperity and glory,"
+some men only saw the horrors of an evil conscience; but Clive from
+early youth had been subject to "fits of strange melancholy," while
+now his strong mind was sinking under physical suffering, and he took
+opium for a distressing complaint.
+
+In Berkeley Square (No. 38) is the town house of Lord Rosebery, once
+the residence of Lady Jersey, and the place whence her mother,--the
+daughter of Child, the banker,--eloped to marry the Earl of
+Westmorland, in 1782.
+
+It were, however, an invidious, as well as an impossible task, to name
+all London's historic houses. What street in London is, indeed, not
+"historic" in a sense? Houses may be pulled down, but even thus their
+locality knows them still. Is not even Turner the painter's squalid,
+dirty house in Queen Anne Street, now razed, yet recalled to the
+passer-by, by the tablet affixed to the houses that have since sprung
+up on its site? "Unlovely" Wimpole Street is sacred to the shade of
+Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that "small, pale person, scarcely
+embodied at all." It was from this house, No. 50, that she wrote her
+impassioned love-letters, and, after years of chronic invalidism, ran
+away, secretly and romantically, to marry a brother-poet. The
+picturesque chambers known as "the Albany,"--a byway out of
+Piccadilly,--recall Lord Macaulay, Lord Byron, Lord Lytton. Curzon
+Street suggests the famous parties, in the early nineteenth century,
+of the sisters Mary and Agnes Berry, the friends of Horace Walpole. In
+Soho,--a district famous in old days for an artistic, and
+semi-Bohemian fraternity, whose houses emulated Turner's in
+dirt,--lived the painters Northcote, Mulready, Fuseli, Stothard,--and
+Flaxman the sculptor. At 28, Poland Street, lived William Blake, the
+poet-painter, the half-crazy, but wholly charming, seer and mystic;
+here he wrote his _Songs of Experience_ and of _Innocence_, and drew
+his _Visionary Portraits_. (The story of Blake and his wife, "reciting
+passages from _Paradise Lost_, and enacting Adam and Eve, in
+character," belongs, however, not to dingy gardenless Poland Street,
+but to Hercules Buildings, then a modest Lambeth suburb). In Poland
+Street, in 1811, lived also Shelley in early youth, with his friend
+and biographer Hogg; the latter being attracted, says Shelley, by the
+name of the street, "because it reminded him of Thaddeus of Warsaw and
+freedom":
+
+     "A paper (says Hogg) in the window of No. 15 announced
+     lodgings.... 'We must lodge there, should we sleep even on
+     the step of a door.' ... Shelley took some objection to the
+     exterior of the house, but we went in.... There was a back
+     sitting-room on the first floor, somewhat dark but quiet,
+     yet quietness was not the prime attraction. The walls of the
+     room had lately been covered with trellised paper.... This
+     was delightful. He went close to the wall and touched it.
+     'We must stay here; stay for ever.' Shelley had the bedroom
+     opening out of the sitting room, and this also was
+     overspread with the trellised paper."
+
+But every part of London has its historic interest--is, in a sense, a
+city peopled by the dead. "Where'er you tread is haunted, holy
+ground." That spot, in that quiet, narrow street,--Mayfair,
+Bloomsbury, Soho or Westminster,--where you chance to live, and toil,
+and suffer, and enjoy,--has known many others in its time,--others
+before you: men in stocks, and wigs, and laced ruffles, and
+knee-breeches; women in brocades, ruffs, and farthingales; children in
+long stiff skirts and prim stomachers: who, in their turn, likewise
+lived, and toiled, and enjoyed, and suffered.... Is it not this
+romance of London, this mysterious past life of hers, guessed and
+unguessed, that makes us welcome, and recognise as real friends, the
+types of a Thackeray, a Dickens? See, for instance, how a mere
+allusion to Thackeray puppets serves to immortalise with a touch, the
+prosaic, if fashionable, Clarges and Bond Streets: Clarges Street,
+"where Beatrix Bernstein held her card parties, her Wednesday and
+Sunday evenings, save during the short season when Ranelagh was open
+on a Sunday, where the desolate old woman sat alone, waiting
+hopelessly for the scapegrace nephew that her battered old heart had
+learned to love."
+
+     "Here, Baroness Bernstein takes her chocolate behind the
+     drawn curtains; she is the Beatrix Esmond of brighter days
+     and fortunes.... There are the windows of Harry
+     Warrington's lodgings in Bond Street, 'at the court end of
+     the town;' geraniums and lobelias flourish in them to this
+     day, and no doubt they are let to some sprig of fashion; but
+     to me they are Harry's rooms, hired from Mr. Ruff, the
+     milliner's husband; and the 'Archie' or 'Bertie' in
+     possession to-day is a mere interloper, whom Gumbo would
+     have politely shown downstairs."--(_Byways of Fiction in
+     London._)
+
+Not less has Dickens done with the lower life of the Great City. And
+has not Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Ritchie), with a touch of her father's
+picturesque and vivid genius, glorified that "Old Court Suburb," Old
+Kensington, in her well-known novel of that name? Here, in Kensington,
+at No. 2, Palace Green, then considerably more countrified than now,
+Thackeray died in 1863. Here, too, is the red brick Kensington Palace,
+built by William and Mary in what Leigh Hunt called "Dutch solidity,"
+famous as Queen Victoria's birth-place, and also more sadly
+reminiscent of poor Caroline of Brunswick, the ill-fated and cruelly
+used wife of George IV.
+
+Holland House is one of the most interesting and historically
+important buildings in Kensington. It stands near Campden Hill, in
+beautiful and spacious gardens, the same gardens where the youthful
+George III. used to flirt with the lovely Sarah Lennox; the lady
+dressed as a shepherdess, playing at haymaking while the King rode by:
+a youthful and a pleasant idyll, in contrast with the lady's very
+chequered after life! Holland House, says Mr. Hare, "surpasses all
+other houses in beauty, rising at the end of the green slope, with its
+richly-sculptured terrace, and its cedars, and its vases of brilliant
+flowers." The house was originally built in 1607, though its
+characteristic wings and arcades were all added later by the first
+Earl of Holland, the same who was beheaded in the Royalist wars. After
+his execution Holland House was confiscated by the Parliamentary
+generals; being, however, restored in 1665 to the disconsolate widow,
+who comforted herself by indulging privately here in the theatricals
+so strictly forbidden by the Puritan Government. Early in the
+eighteenth century Holland House became associated with Addison (of
+_Spectator_ fame); he lived here for some three years after his
+ambitious marriage with Charlotte, Countess of Warwick, a marriage
+which, despite its splendour, report says was not happy for the
+bridegroom. According to Dr. Johnson, it was more or less "on terms
+like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan
+is reported to pronounce, 'Daughter, I give thee this man for thy
+slave.'" But the chief interest of Holland House lies in its having
+been for so many years the centre of a great literary and political
+_coterie_, and the resort of Whig orators and politicians. In the
+lifetime of the third Lord Holland, who died in 1840, the house was at
+the height of its splendour as a world-renowned intellectual centre.
+Holland House still exists in its integrity, though Macaulay long ago
+prophesied mournfully that
+
+     "The wonderful city may soon displace those turrets and
+     gardens which are associated with so much that is
+     interesting and noble--with the courtly magnificence of
+     Rich, with the loves of Ormond, with the councils of
+     Cromwell, with the death of Addison."
+
+"The gardens of Holland House" (says Mr. Hare) "are unlike anything
+else in England. Every turn is a picture.... A raised terrace, like
+some of those which belong to old Genoese palaces, leads from the
+house high amongst the branches of the trees to the end of the flower
+garden.... Facing a miniature Dutch garden here is "Rogers' Seat,"
+inscribed:
+
+  "Here Rogers sat, and here for ever dwell
+   With me those pleasures that he sings so well."
+
+Lord Macaulay's last residence was, as I have said, "Holly Lodge." In
+this secluded villa, high walled-in from the outer world, were the two
+requisites for an author's ideal of happiness, a library and a garden.
+The house bears a memorial tablet. Here the great writer died while
+quietly seated in his library chair, his book open beside him; a
+peaceful close of a busy life.
+
+I have named a few of our great Londoners; yet they, indeed, are but
+few among the vast galaxy of the bright particular stars who, even in
+our day, still enlighten with their spirit their former dwellings and
+surroundings. It is their human interest that so transfigures London
+stones; it is the mighty dead of England, the "choir invisible,"
+
+  "of those immortal dead who live again
+   In minds made better by their presence: live....
+   To make undying music in the world"--
+
+that lend to their city such enchantment. Surely something of this
+feeling,--of this enchantment--is ours when we think of the long roll
+of great spirits who illumined the archives of the past. There is a
+magic, a glamour, in London streets, that affects the strongest heads
+and hearts. All honour to them--to poor human nature,--that it is so.
+Not only, let us hope, to the mad poet-painter Blake was it given to
+"meet the Apostle Paul in Piccadilly." We, too, may, if we will, walk
+with Milton in Cripplegate, may share Byron's Titanic gloom in the
+quaint Albany precincts, may wander with Charles Lamb in those Temple
+Gardens that he so loved, and may listen with him and Dickens to the
+pleasant tinkle of the rippling water in secluded Fountain Court. We
+inherit these associations, and we may--inestimable privilege--see our
+London, our "towne of townes, patrone and not compare," through the
+eyes of all the great men who loved her in the past.
+
+  "The dull brick houses of the square,
+   The bustle of the thoroughfare,
+   The sounds, the sights, the crush of men,
+   Are present, but forgotten then.
+
+  "With such companions at my side
+   I float on London's human tide;
+   An atom on its billows thrown,
+   But lonely never, nor alone."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Cricket in the Parks._]
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+RUS IN URBE
+
+  "It is my delight to be
+   Both in town and in countree."--_Old Couplet._
+
+  "If one must have a villa in summer to dwell,
+   Oh, give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall."--_Charles Morris._
+
+
+Oh, London! beautiful London! who would not be with thee in May? Paris
+should not, surely, be recommended as the only Mecca of that lovely
+month. When the London street authorities, with unwonted forbearance,
+have for one brief moment suspended their incessant repairing of the
+busiest thoroughfares; when the hanging gardens of Park Lane, and the
+window-boxes of Seven Dials, alike display their "pavilions of tender
+green"; when Piccadilly is blocked with traffic; when Rotten Row is
+thronged with the smart world; when the shops hang out their
+daintiest spring fashions; when the gay parterres of the Parks show
+flowers of kaleidoscopic brilliance, and their sylvan seclusions
+suggest the "real country," what can be more delightful than our own
+often-maligned metropolis?
+
+The Parks of London are, perhaps, the element that most surprises the
+foreigner unused to English tastes and ways. Here are neither the
+leafy terraces and regular alleys of German capitals, nor the trim
+well-clipped boscages and levels of Versailles and the Tuileries; but
+only mere stretches of park-like greensward, dotted here and there, in
+charming irregularity, with old trees of noble girth. Walks there are,
+indeed, and footpaths, shrubberies, and flower-beds; but the chief
+area of the London Parks is, ever and always, this fresh, radiant,
+undulating turf, turf which here, more than ever, suggests the little
+Board School girl's answer to a question on general knowledge: "Turf,
+ma'am, is grass and clean dirt put together by God."
+
+Of Hyde Park, the largest and oldest of the London Parks, Disraeli
+said truly in one of his novels: "Hyde Park has still about it
+something of Arcadia. There are woods and waters, and the occasional
+illusion of an illimitable distance of sylvan joyance." The history of
+Hyde Park is the history, generally, of Greater London; first
+monastery grounds, then royal demesne, then again, the people's. Some
+of the old trees may even have seen the ancient manor of Hyde; some of
+them must certainly recall the time when this was a royal Tudor
+hunting-ground, well-stocked with deer. Many of its fine old
+timber-trees have, however, disappeared, so that the famous "Ring" of
+Charles II.'s time can be now but imperfectly traced.
+
+The Parks are, naturally, "the lungs of London." Were it not for these
+large "open spaces," so mercifully preserved to us by the wisdom and
+farsightedness of former rulers and legislators, the health of the
+great city would hardly now be what it is. The little town of the
+early centuries, Roman, Saxon, or Norman, surrounded by country woods
+and pastures,--dotted with the gardens of merchants and magnates, as
+well as with frequent convent closes, orchards, and leafy
+precincts,--had small need of such vast pleasure-grounds. For London,
+even in Elizabeth's day, consisted (as shown in Aggas's map), of only
+two tiny townlets, "London" and "Westminster"; beyond, all was open
+fields. Tottenham Court Road, that dreary thoroughfare of ugly
+modernity, was the solitary manor of "Toten Court," a sylvan resort
+for "cakes and creame": Chelsea was a pretty, distant riverside
+hamlet; Regent Street and Bond Street were cows' pastures, and the
+"flowery fields" of "Marybone" were altogether in the rural distances.
+Who, indeed, would recognise the present Regent's Park in these lines
+(from an old play called "Tottenham Court"):
+
+  "What a dainty life the milkmaid leads,
+   When o'er these flowery meads
+   She dabbles in dew,
+   And sings to her cow,
+   And feels not the pain
+   Of love or disdain...."
+
+But if, to the London of old time, the Parks were not necessary, to
+modern London, which has more than doubled its population and its area
+in the last century and a half, they are an unspeakable boon. Our
+forefathers were wise in their generation when they secured these
+stretches of the outlying country for public use. We, too, in our own
+day, make similar efforts, efforts of which the recent preservation of
+Parliament Fields, of part of Caen Wood, affords sufficient proof. In
+that far-off day, prophesied by "Mother Shipton," when "Primrose Hill
+shall be the centre of London," such breathing spaces, such oases in
+the wilderness of bricks and mortar, would prove of quite incalculable
+value.
+
+Happily, London, even in her rampant growth, is often jealously
+mindful of her responsibilities. Though our city boasts no such
+spacious boulevards as are to be seen in Paris, trees are often now
+planted at intervals on the sidewalks in many of the newest
+thoroughfares, and a few of the older streets are being widened and
+improved. Very few are the London views, as I have said elsewhere,
+that are not in a measure enlivened by foliage or greenery.
+
+The colouring of London is a thing peculiar to itself; it requires to
+be specially studied, even by painters whose eyes are trained to
+observation. Its wonderful atmospheric effects have been only more or
+less recently recognised by them. Very few artists have rendered
+thoroughly the strange cold light on the London streets; cold, yet
+suffused by an underlying glow, by a warmth of colour hardly at first
+guessed by the spectator. Even a rainy day of London greyness--what
+does the poet's eye see in it?
+
+  "Rain in the measureless street,
+   Vistas of orange and blue....
+   Blue of wet road, of wet sky,
+   (Grey in the depths and the heights),
+   Orange of numberless lights,
+   Shapes fleeting on, going by...."
+
+The cold pearly greyness of winter, the blue mist of spring, the
+silvery haze of summer, the orange sunsets of autumn, when the dim sun
+sinks in the fog like a gigantic red fireball, all, in turn, have
+their charm. The artist's fault is that he nearly always paints London
+scenes too cold, too joyless. Mr. Herbert Marshall, the water-colour
+painter, to whom we are indebted for so many charming impressions of
+the London streets, leans, if anything, somewhat to the other side,
+and hardly allows for the aesthetic value of smoke. Painting, in
+London, is always a difficulty; but Mr. Marshall, it is said, used to
+station himself and his paraphernalia securely inside some
+road-mending enclosure, and thus pursue his calling undeterred by the
+persecution of the idle.
+
+[Illustration: _Rotten Row._]
+
+The faint blue-grey mist of the great city often gives to London
+scenes something of the quality of dissolving views. Seldom is a
+vista perfectly clear; rather does it often suggest a vague intensity
+of misty glory. Does not that lovely glimpse of the Whitehall palaces
+from St. James's Park, seen, on fine days in summer, from the little
+bridge over the "ornamental water," gain an added charm from distance?
+Do not the more or less prosaic Government buildings appear to be the
+
+  "cloud-capt towers and gorgeous palaces"
+
+of some dream of Oriental splendour? In such guise, one might imagine,
+would the deceiving visions of a "Fata Morgana,"--a fairy palace,
+shaded by just such branching, feathery trees,--appear to the
+thirsting traveller over the desert sands.
+
+Even M. Max O'Rell, who allows himself to scoff at most things
+English, has a word of admiration for the peculiar misty beauty of the
+London parks.
+
+     "Nothing" (he says) "is more imposing than the exuberant
+     beauty of the parks. Take a walk across them in the early
+     morning when there is no one stirring, and the nightingale
+     is singing high up in some gigantic tree; it is one of the
+     rare pleasures that you will find within your reach in
+     London. If the morning be fine, you will not fail to be
+     struck with a lovely pearl-grey haze, soft and subdued, that
+     I never saw in such perfection as in the London parks."
+
+The parks of London, like its districts, all have their special
+attributes, their special place in the social plane. Thus, Hyde Park
+is aristocratic, and in the season, its penny chairs, from Hyde Park
+Corner to the Albert Gate, are thronged with the smart world.
+Beautiful women, distinguished men, and gilded youths may be seen
+riding--the best riders and the finest horses in the world--along
+Rotten Row at the fashionable morning hour; and, in the afternoon, the
+whole of "Society" appears to take its afternoon drive round the magic
+"Ring" or circle of the Park, enjoying seeing and being seen. Three
+times round the Ring is a common afternoon allowance; exercise,
+surely, that habit must render, in time, not unlike a treadmill. In
+Hyde Park, too, takes place the yearly meet of the "Four-in-Hand"
+Club, extensively patronised by rank and royalty; on which the popular
+sentiment is delightfully echoed by the refrain of the cockney song of
+_The Runaway Girl_,
+
+  "I'd have four horses with great long tails,
+   If my papa were the Prince of Wales!"
+
+Here in the Park, on Sundays, takes place the famous "Church Parade,"
+so paragraphed in the society papers; here, also, are often ratified
+on May mornings, the season's matrimonial engagements; and here fond
+mothers with pretty daughters keep a watchful outlook for
+"detrimentals."
+
+[Illustration: _Rotten Row._]
+
+"The Ring," in Stuart times, was the scene of frequent duels, the most
+noted of which was that between Lord Mohun and the Duke of Hamilton
+(made use of in Thackeray's _Esmond_), in 1712, when both combatants
+were killed. And one of the saddest modern associations of this
+circular drive is connected with Mrs. Carlyle's death here on April
+21, 1866. The poor lady, to whom a brougham and an afternoon drive
+were luxuries of her later and invalid years, died quietly and
+silently in her carriage from heart failure caused by shock at a
+trivial accident to her small dog, which she had put out to run at
+Victoria Gate, near the Marble Arch; the coachman, knowing nothing of
+the fatality, driving on for some time before discovering the sad
+truth.
+
+The Tyburnia end of Hyde Park is that most frequented by the populace.
+If the smart world monopolises the vicinity of Hyde Park Corner, the
+green spaces fringing the Bayswater Road, and near the Marble Arch,
+are generally appropriated by tired workmen and idle loafers, who lie
+about on the grass, in enviable bliss, on hot days in summer, looking
+like nothing so much as an army of soldiers mown down by a Maxim gun,
+and contentedly appreciating the fact that here in London, for once,
+they have found free and undisputed possession--a place where:
+
+  "no price is set on the lavish summer,
+   June may be had by the poorest comer."
+
+In the space opposite the Marble Arch is the so-called "Reformers'
+Tree," where political meetings sometimes take place on Sundays, and
+where preachers, lecturers, and "cranks" of every possible
+denomination, hold their respective courts. Visitors to London should
+make a point of witnessing this curious and well-known phase of London
+life; the outcome, M. Taine seems to suggest, of the latent
+seriousness of the British mind; "an intense conviction, which for
+lack of an outlet, would degenerate into madness, melancholy, or
+sedition." Mr. Anstey in the pages of _Punch_, has, in his own
+inimitable way, described these scenes, which are familiar to the
+readers of "Voces Populi."
+
+[Illustration: _The Serpentine, Hyde Park._]
+
+The "Serpentine," a large sheet of water mainly artificial,
+certainly cannot be said to "serpent," for it has but a very slight
+bend. Originating, however, at a period when all garden walks and
+ponds were of painful Dutch regularity, it owes its name to this
+trifling deviation. This prettily devised and wooded piece of water is
+due mainly to Queen Caroline, wife to George II., an energetic lady
+with gardening tastes. Very charming is the view to be obtained from
+the five-arched stone bridge over the Serpentine, "a view," says Mr.
+Henry James, "of extraordinary nobleness." Yet the Serpentine, too,
+has its tragic associations. Perhaps it suggests, in its beauty, the
+haunting lines:
+
+  "When Life hangs heavy, Death remains the door
+   To endless rest beside the Stygian shore."
+
+Always a noted spot for suicides, it was the place chosen by Harriet
+Westbrook, the unfortunate first wife of Shelley, for the ending of
+the many troubles of her short life; "a rash act," says Professor
+Dowden with praiseworthy partisanship, which it "seems certain that no
+act of Shelley's, during the two years which immediately preceded her
+death, tended to cause." "Shelley," comments Matthew Arnold drily,
+"had been living with another woman all the time; only that!"
+
+The charm of Kensington Gardens--detached from Hyde Park in later
+times--is, perhaps, its greater seclusion and air of guarded calm, as
+befits the gardens surrounding a royal palace. No carriages are
+allowed to profane its sacred shades; no rude sounds of the outer
+world penetrate its leafy bowers. In one pleasant spot of greenery a
+welcome innovation has lately been introduced in the summer months, in
+the shape of afternoon tea _al fresco_, provided by an enterprising
+club, and of late much frequented by the fashionable world. Kensington
+Gardens are always very select in their _coterie_; on their western
+side stands the old Dutch palace of solid red-brick, built for William
+and Mary,--sorrowed in by desolate Queen Anne,--birthplace of Queen
+Victoria, worthiest, noblest, and most lamented of her line. With
+her, most of all, are the associations of Kensington Gardens now bound
+up. In these pretty walks crowded still by the children and nurses of
+the wealthy and noble, the little royal girl used to play, regardless
+alike of her coming doom--or glory.
+
+Yet, with all the nursery din of Kensington Gardens--an English
+_Tuileries_--there yet are spots so secluded and so quiet as still to
+justify Matthew Arnold's lovely lines:
+
+  "In this lone, open glade I lie,
+   Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
+   And at its end, to stay the eye,
+   Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-trees stand!
+
+  "Birds here make song, each bird has his,
+   Across the girding city's hum.
+   How green under the boughs it is!
+   How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!
+
+  "Here at my feet what wonders pass,
+   What endless, active life is here!
+   What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
+   An air-stirred forest, fresh and clear.
+
+  "In the huge world, which roars hard by,
+   Be others happy if they can!
+   But in my helpless cradle I
+   Was breathed on by the rural Pan.
+
+  "Yet here is peace for ever new!
+   When I who watch them am away,
+   Still all things in this glade go through
+   The changes of their quiet day."
+
+Poor Haydon, the painter, whose fitful genius went out so sadly in
+lurid gloom, said of Kensington Gardens that "here are some of the
+most poetical bits of tree and stump, and sunny brown and green glens
+and tawny earth." Disraeli, also, wrote of it as follows in his most
+"classically-flowery" manner:--
+
+     "The inhabitants of London are scarcely sufficiently
+     sensible of the beauty of its environs. On every side the
+     most charming retreats open to them.... In exactly ten
+     minutes it is in the power of every man to free himself from
+     all the tumult of the world; the pangs of love, the throbs
+     of ambition, the wear and tear of play, the recriminating
+     boudoir, the conspiring club, the rattling hell, and find
+     himself in a sublime sylvan solitude superior to the cedars
+     of Lebanon, and inferior only in extent to the chestnut
+     forests of Anatolia. It is Kensington Gardens that is almost
+     the only place that has realised his idea of the forests of
+     Spenser and Ariosto."
+
+[Illustration: _Tea in Kensington Gardens._]
+
+What havoc, truly, the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Prince Consort's
+darling scheme, must have wrought in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens!
+And what would the bright particular spirits of the present day now
+think of such irreverent, such high-handed proceedings? Even the
+Kensington Museum now eschews the too close neighbourhood of ephemeral
+Exhibitions; they are relegated to the more distant shades of Olympia
+and of Earl's Court; the immense Crystal Palace--the Exhibition
+building--now flourishes at Sydenham, and the site of the great show
+is commemorated in Hyde Park by the Albert Memorial, an edifice about
+the merits of which much difference of opinion rages. Yet, even its
+detractors must own the magnificence of the monument, and admire the
+eastern opulence of its mosaics, its gilding, its bronzes and marbles.
+
+But St. James's Park is really, in some ways, quite the prettiest of
+the London parks, and though sufficiently aristocratic, it is yet much
+frequented by the populace. "A genuine piece of country, and of
+English country," Taine says of it. Round it are situated royal
+palaces and beautiful mansions, standing amidst their spacious
+gardens. North of St. James's Park stretches the Mall, so named from
+the ancient game of "Paille Maille," played here by the gay court of
+Charles II. The game consisted in striking a ball, with a mallet,
+through an iron ring, down a straight walk powdered with
+cockle-shells. Here, in later Stuart and Hanoverian times, was to be
+seen the very height of London fashion, the ladies in "full dress,"
+and their cavaliers carrying their hats under their arms. Perhaps, of
+all the varying "modes" flaunted from time to time in the "Mall," the
+fashions of 1800-1810 would strike us now as being the most peculiar.
+
+[Illustration: _A Fountain in St. James's Park._]
+
+East of St. James's Park are the stately Government Offices, and south
+is Birdcage Walk, overlooked by the pretty hanging gardens and
+balconies that adorn the mansions of picturesque Queen Anne's Gate.
+Where "Spring Gardens" now stand was, in old days, "Milk Fair," where
+asses' and cows' milk was sold to the votaries of fashion, to repair
+the ravages of late hours and "routs." Milk-vendors, boasting their
+descent from the original holders, have still their cow-stall at the
+park corner under the elm-trees. In the distance the grey old abbey,
+with its delicate tracery, appears at intervals above the trees and
+buildings; and, though so near the city smoke, the Ornithological
+Society breeds many beautiful aquatic birds on a small island on the
+Ornamental Water. St. James's Park is a series of pictures; the
+sketcher, too, will find many convenient seats, as well as charming
+views.
+
+It is difficult to believe that this lovely park was, in pre-Tudor
+times, merely a swampy field, pertaining to a hospital "for fourteen
+maidens that were leprous," and far beyond the precincts of the little
+London of that day. (The lepers' hospital itself stood where now
+stands St. James's Palace.) It was Henry VIII. who removed the leper
+maidens, converting their asylum into a palace, their field into a
+park; a park used as the private garden to the palace until Charles
+II.'s time, at which period it was made public and laid out by a
+French landscape gardener called "Le Notre." There is a story that
+Queen Caroline, wife to George II., wished to appropriate the Park
+once more for the sole use of the Palace, and asked "what it would
+cost to effect this?" "Only three crowns," was the pithy answer of the
+minister, Sir Robert Walpole.
+
+Beautiful as St. James's Park still is, it must have been yet more
+charming a century-and-a-half ago, when no houses as yet intervened
+between it and the grey dignity of the old Abbey of Westminster, and
+when the vanished _Rosamond's Pond_, with its wild and romantic banks,
+gave a rural attraction to the scene. _Rosamond's Pond_, mentioned by
+Pope and other writers, was a favourite trysting-place for lovers, and
+had also, from its seclusion, a less enviable notoriety for suicides.
+
+Charles II., was especially fond of St. James's Park; he would sit
+here for hours among his dogs, amusing himself with the tame ducks,
+that he had himself introduced; the descendants of these ducks, it is
+said, flourish, like those of the milk-vendors, to this day, and are
+fed familiarly by constant Londoners. Perhaps it was Charles's
+fondness for animals that, by a natural sequence of events, caused the
+park, somewhat later, to become a sort of Zoological Gardens for
+London. Birds of all kinds still thrive in it, although distant
+Battersea Park, new and semi-suburban, now claims its share of
+ornithological fame. The London County Council, among other good
+works, has adopted towards animals the protecting _role_ of Charles
+II., and sedulously encourages bird-life in the parks; woe, therefore,
+to the boy or man, who goes bird-nesting or bird-snaring in one of
+these sacred enclosures! Wild birds reciprocate the Council's paternal
+care by taking up their lodging in Battersea of their own free will. A
+cuckoo's egg was even found in Battersea Park lately, laid, very
+annoyingly, in a "whitethroat's" nest, which had been made in a
+bamboo-bush in the "sub-tropical" part of the gardens. Nevertheless,
+the charitable whitethroats overlooked the liberty, and safely hatched
+that cuckoo. Battersea Park claims, moreover, robins, tits,
+hedge-sparrows, chaffinches, wrens, and greenfinches; to say nothing
+of herons, and even a white blackbird. Birds take kindly to London; do
+not even the gulls come up the river by thousands in severe winters,
+as the Albatross came to the call of the Ancient Mariner? Also, over
+200 wood pigeons are said to roost regularly on the Battersea Park
+islands. But then, wood-pigeons seem to be everywhere at home in
+London. Do they not haunt the city gardens that lie behind Queen
+Square, and coo sweetly all through the London spring and summer?
+
+If Battersea Park, with its charmingly laid-out gardens, its wealth of
+tropical plants, all its feathered population, and its river glories
+of twilight and sunset, is yet undistinguished, so also is the
+Regent's Park, which is situated at quite another, (though equally
+semi-suburban), angle of the metropolis. Regent's Park, like
+Battersea Park, is the resort of the great middle-class. Here you may
+see, on Bank Holidays, the groups so lovingly described by Ibsen,
+"father, mother, and troop of children," all drest in their Sunday
+best, and all dropping orange-peel cheerfully as they go. Here too, on
+Sundays, is a "Church Parade," quite as crowded as that of Hyde Park,
+though not, perhaps, so largely noticed in the "society" papers. The
+demeanour of the young couples is perhaps here a trifle more
+boisterous, that of their elders perhaps a shade more prim; the attire
+of the ladies, generally, a thought more crude. The wide middle avenue
+of Regent's Park, on Sundays, affords capital study to those
+interested in the vast subject of Man and Manners. And then the great
+middle class is so much more amusing than are the "Well-Connected"!
+
+The flowers in Regent's Park, in spring and early summer, are a yearly
+marvel and a delight. Not even those of Hyde Park, in all their
+season's glory, can surpass them. On each side of the large middle
+avenue, gay parterres vie with one another in brilliance. Tulips,
+hyacinths of wonderful shades, all the glory of spring bulbs, make
+way, later, for summer "bedding-out-plants" in lovely combinations of
+colour. Crocuses, scillas, and snowdrops, too, are scattered here and
+there, with a charming air of lavishness, over the grassy slopes: this
+has a delightful effect, giving all the look and suggestion of wild
+flowers.
+
+Regent's Park has, then, an unrivalled charm to the flower-lover. (And
+what true Londoner, one may ask, is not a flower-lover? The Londoner
+loves flowers with an intensity undreamed of in the real country.) The
+slum children, who frequent this park in large numbers, respect, as a
+rule, the flower-beds. Slum-children are, generally, as I have
+observed from experience gathered in the Temple Gardens, St. Paul's
+Churchyard, Leicester Square and elsewhere,--more reverently inclined,
+as regards flowers, than their more pampered contemporaries; though,
+of course, nature is nature, and there may be occasional lapses.
+Thus, the other day I chanced to notice, in Regent's Park, two small
+girls "of the people," whose ideas on the subject of "property" seemed
+just a trifle elementary. They were ragged and hungry-looking too, and
+to add to the pathos of their rags, one of them flourished a broken
+green parasol, and the other one's tattered hat flaunted a dirty pink
+ostrich feather:
+
+"Oh, Lizer," I heard the smallest one say, "I _do_ wish I could git
+one o' them flowers! jest one geranium, for ter stick in my 'air at
+Sunday-school ter-morrer! They'd niver miss it"!
+
+"_Certingly_ not! The p'leaceman 'ud be after you, pretty sharp," says
+the elder child, severely. "You know 'ow Bert caught it, three weeks
+back, for on'y a-breakin orf of two daffies, and one of 'em nearly
+dead too! Well, (relenting), "you _may_ git me jest a few, if you kin
+do it so's the p'leaceman can't see".... Rosie, shet it!" as the
+younger girl clutched at some flowers: "I see 'im a-comin' towards us,
+this minnit! No, if you please, we ain't done nothin', sir! My sister
+an' me, sir, we was on'y jest a-lookin' at the flowers, an' saying as
+'ow beautiful they _'ad_ grown, since this Sat'day gone a week....
+_Our_ garding ain't got no show to equil them, and we ain't got no cut
+flowers, for onst, in ma's drorin'-room; and these 'ere is grown that
+beautiful."
+
+"You was a-goin' to 'elp 'em grow, wasn't you?" said the policeman,
+good-naturedly enough: "_I_ see you a-stretchin' over them railin's!
+_Your_ garding's a alley, that's wot it is! an' your drorin'-room is
+jest a three-pair-model, _I_ back!... I know your sort! 'Ere, tike
+yerselves orf, double quick!"
+
+The ignorant in such matters may, perhaps, vaguely wonder, in Regent's
+Park, why the comfortable chairs provided, apparently, for man's
+delectation, are all deserted of the multitude, and why, on the other
+hand, the iron seats are crammed to repletion? The explanation is a
+simple one. The chairs cost a penny each to sit on! It is, however,
+not unusual to see a stray marauder occupy one of these sacred
+resting-places for a stolen minute of bliss, and, on seeing the
+approach of the Guardian of the Park furniture (whence such guardians
+spring up is ever a mystery), rise and absent himself in well-feigned
+abstraction.
+
+[Illustration: _The Reformer._]
+
+Regent's Park, like Hyde Park, is a focus of itinerant lecturers and
+preachers. These have apparently established a kind of "Sunday right"
+to the upper part of the long avenue of trees beyond the
+flower-gardens. Here, as in the larger park, may be seen "cranks" of
+every kind. Thus, one lecturer will hold up to obloquy an unkind
+caricature of Mr. Chamberlain, representing the great man with the
+addition of horns and hoofs; another, proclaiming the gospel of
+Jingoism, will shout himself hoarse in the attempt to drown his
+adversary. (Political meetings, however, may now possibly be regarded
+with disfavour by the authorities, the Boer War having lately rendered
+many of them somewhat picturesque in incident.) Under another big
+tree, a Revivalist meeting will be held, accompanied by sundry groans
+and sobs, and varied at intervals by hymns sung to the accompaniment
+of a harmonium or a small piano-organ. The first beginnings of
+lectures, as of righteousness, are hard. One poor orator, on the
+outskirts of the crowd, I saw myself arrive on the scene, and "work
+up" his lecture to the unsympathetic and goggle-eyed audience of a
+small cockney nursemaid, a perambulator, and two wailing babies. I
+quite felt for that poor man; nevertheless, he persevered, and in only
+five minutes auditors had already begun to trickle in. (A considerable
+percentage of the Park congregations, I may here observe, had no
+"fixed city," no abiding convictions; they wandered about here and
+there, from one preacher to another, "just as fate or fancy carried";
+or, rather, to whichever of the said preachers happened at the moment
+to be the most emphatic.) With lectures _al fresco_, as with other
+things, it would appear to be only the _premier pas qui coute_; and
+soon the would-be orator had a distinguished and motley following.
+What, exactly, he was lecturing about, it is really beyond me to say,
+for my attention was largely woolgathering about the crowd; but he
+seemed, like Mr. Chadband, of immortal memory, to repeat himself a
+good deal, and to be very angry indeed about something or other.
+Indeed, I doubt whether the majority of his audience quite understood
+the orator's drift, but they knew that he was bellowing with all the
+strength of his lungs, and Englishmen always respect a man who makes
+sufficient noise. The lecturer's anger seemed, strangely enough, to be
+directed against poor, unoffending Regent's Park itself:
+
+"For twenty years," he kept reiterating, "for twenty years Regent's
+Park has been allowed to speak, unhindered, under this very tree. For
+twenty years it has found its voice, ay, and its pence, too, here....
+Is it to continue to find them, or not? That is the question.... Does
+Regent's Park wish to sit tamely under insult? to lie down to be
+crushed? to bend its back to the tyrant?" (here the speaker, in his
+fervour, seemed to get a trifle mixed in his similes.)
+
+"'Ear, 'ear," said a chubby baker's boy, who had stopped for a moment
+to listen; and one of the forgotten babies in the perambulator wailed.
+
+"Will Regent's Park, I say, tolerate this? It is, let me repeat it, it
+is for Regent's Park to decide!"
+
+But the "Regent's Park" of the hour, though thus eloquently adjured,
+was evidently not to be roused to fury; or even to decision. "Kim on
+'ome," cries the nurse-girl to the twins, hitching the perambulator
+round with a sudden jerk: "Go it, old kipper," shouts a facetious
+larrikin. Alas! even now "Regent's Park," with its pence too, was
+apathetically melting away towards that all-important function of the
+day--its "tea."
+
+There is, indeed, much "life" to be found in Regent's Park.
+
+Some of London's pleasantest "by-ways" are the pretty, well-kept,
+and delightfully planted walks of the Zoological Gardens. One of the
+big gates of this institution opens near upon the "preaching trees"
+of Regent's Park; and, certainly, after a close experience of the
+"human animal," the rest of the mammalia, unoffending, harmless, and
+discreetly caged, often occur as quite a pleasant contrast. (I wonder
+that the simile did not occur to Lord Beaconsfield himself; it is
+certainly in his line.) Thackeray also, who enjoyed the Zoo greatly,
+saw, as befitted a great novelist, the human side of it: "If I have
+cares on my mind," he wrote, "I come to the Zoo, and fancy they
+don't pass the gate; I recognise my friends, my enemies, in
+countless cages." Yes, the Zoo is an unfailing pleasure; I can
+conscientiously recommend it, with one word of caution: Do not
+choose a very hot day for the excursion: be careful to go a little
+to windward of the feline race, and eschew the monkey house as much
+as possible. Poor Sally the chimpanzee is dead, alas! of
+consumption, and none of her successors, surely, can make up for the
+very unendurable temperature that has ever to be maintained round
+them. Monkeys are sad victims to pulmonary disease; every London fog
+kills, it is said, a few of them. The reptile house is, however,
+cool and pleasant; and the ponds for aquatic birds are very charming
+resorts. Altogether, if the great carnivora and the great crowds be
+shunned, the Zoological Garden becomes distinctly pleasant; its
+walks, moreover, have all the unexpectedness of "Alice's"
+peregrinations in the "Live-Flower-Garden," where, continually,
+round some bowery corner, she came face to face with strange and
+uncanny-looking beasts. Just so, in the Zoological Gardens, you may
+suddenly chance upon an amiable, blinking Owl, or a casual Parrot,
+or a wondering Pelican, peering at you round some bush in the
+shrubbed pathway. Yet another caution: Do not be tempted, under any
+circumstances, to ride the Elephant. Its saddle has a knife-board
+seat adapted only to juveniles; those of the Society's servants who
+assist you to mount the beast are uncomfortably facetious; and when
+you are at last safely on top, you feel positively vindictive
+towards the small children who, down in the depths below you, trifle
+with your life by offering your elephant a bun.
+
+The Botanical Gardens, enclosed by the ring drive called "The Inner
+Circle," are, perhaps, best known to Londoners by their three big
+flower-shows, held in May and June; important functions which are
+thronged by all the world of rank and fashion.
+
+But, delightful as are these open spaces and public gardens, there is,
+perhaps, a homelier charm in one's very own London garden,--one's own
+private _rus in urbe_. I myself never pass through any part of
+suburban or semi-suburban London by railway, without looking at all
+the back-gardens of the small houses. Oliver Wendell Holmes says that
+a man's belongings and house are an index of his character; but,
+surely, his garden, or even his yard, is more so. The nature, for
+instance, that can willingly content itself with a clothes-line and
+six mouldy cabbage-stalks, while the neighbouring London yards flaunt
+the golden sunflower, or the graceful foxglove,--reflects, surely, its
+own shallowness. And if in central London the poor have no small yard
+even, is there not always a window sill, where from some biscuit tin
+(in North-Italian fashion,) or from some painted wooden crate, flowers
+may spring, and rejoice the heart of many a poor wanderer, dreaming,
+like Wordsworth's Susan, of country meadows and streams? Even the sins
+of a fried-fish shop may be redeemed by yellow trails of "creeping
+jenny" from a box above it; even the powerful aroma of "sheeps'
+trotters" may be almost forgotten in the enjoyment of a stray plant of
+musk, treasured in some poor man's window-corner. It may be only "a
+weakly monthly rose that don't grow, or a tea-plant with five black
+leaves and one green," yet it reflects pleasantly, none the less, the
+owner's saving grace of taste. To some, this kind of humble garden has
+a charm all its own. "My gardens," said Gray the poet proudly, "are in
+the windows like those of a lodger up three pair of stairs in
+Petticoat Lane, or Camomile Street, and they go to bed regularly under
+the same roof that I do." There is, I believe, a society for the
+cultivation of "window-gardening" among the poor, a society that gives
+prizes to the best results; the movement is a good one, and really
+deserves encouragement. To beautify the dull and often ugly lives of
+the London poor,--what society could have a much worthier aim? How
+many a hideous slum--some "Rosemary Lane," or "Hawthorn Lane,"--has
+been redeemed from utter gloom by some sprig of greenery, some frond
+of sickly fern, some crippled and stunted plant brought there, at some
+time, by some good angel of the poor?
+
+As to the occasional gardens of the larger houses, these, when they do
+exist, have, to the faithful Londoner, a beauty all their own; shut
+in and hidden, they have something of the quiet of old cathedral
+closes, as well as the charm of unexpectedness. And then--last, best
+of all! they hang out their "pavilions of tender green" without giving
+any trouble in that "spring cleaning," so trying to London housewives.
+Of course, however, London gardens do not thrive without affection and
+interest. If neglected, they die; if tended, they repay your care with
+a gratitude almost human. Too often the making of gardens in London is
+on this wise:--First, the workman, or gardener, levies an assortment
+of old sardine tins, kettles and other household rubbish; next, he
+arranges a good solid layer of brickbats; then he levels the
+"parterre" with a few old sacks and coats; then, finally, he fills up
+the chinks with a little dank, sour, half-starved London soil--"dirt"
+is indeed the only name for it!--adding a thin layer of it over the
+whole. Then the garden is considered "finished," and ready for the
+credulous to sow their seeds. Such a London garden--a catwalk rather
+than a thing of beauty--is perhaps only redeemed from utter dreariness
+by an occasional plane-tree.
+
+Plane-trees, which thrive in London because of their tidy habit of
+shedding their sooty bark yearly, are luxuriant all over the
+metropolis, but especially so in Bloomsbury. Here also lived Amy Levy,
+most pathetic of London poets, and here she watched and loved her
+tree.
+
+  "Green is the plane-tree in the square,
+   The other trees are brown;
+   They droop and pine for country air;
+   The plane-tree loves the town.
+
+  "Here, from my garret-pane, I mark
+   The plane-tree bud and blow,
+   Shed her recuperative bark,
+   And spread her shade below.
+
+  "Among her branches, in and out,
+   The city breezes play;
+   The dun fog wraps her round about;
+   Above, the smoke curls grey.
+
+  "Others the country take for choice,
+   And hold the town in scorn;
+   But she has listened to the voice
+   Of city breezes borne."
+
+The purple _clematis jackmanii_, which flowers so well in the Regent's
+Park terraces and in Kensington, flowers also yearly on a certain
+sunny balcony in Tavistock Square; the iris hangs out its brilliant
+flags every summer in St. Pancras Churchyard--close under those
+smoke-begrimed Caryatids whose sad eyes gaze ever, not on to the
+Peiraeus and to the Aegean Sea, but towards the dreary and
+everlastingly murky Euston Road.
+
+Even grass will grow in shut-in, walled Bloomsbury gardens; it may,
+indeed, sometimes require treating as an "annual"; but what of that?
+If the difficulties of the London garden are great, why, so are its
+joys.
+
+Cats are, of course, the primal difficulty. We know how lately the
+"Carlyle House" in Chelsea was cursed with them; it is said, also,
+that a certain eccentric lady once lived with a family of some
+eighty-six cats, in a house in Southampton Row. The descendants of
+these cats must, one thinks, still haunt the neighbourhood, to judge
+from the number that prowl in it. Cats, in London, often become wild
+animals, and lose all their domestic charm. "Cats," as the little
+Board School essayist naively wrote: "has nine liveses, which is
+seldom required in this country 'cos of yumanity." The "yumanity" in
+question seems, however, to be rather at a discount in London. For
+cats' owners have a distracting habit of going away for the summer and
+leaving the poor beasts, so to speak, "on the parish." Five such cats,
+starving and sick, have I, to my own knowledge, gently released from a
+cruel world at a neighbouring chemist's. A little boy--one "of the
+streets streety," once held poor pussy while the quietus--of prussic
+acid--was administered: "Won't I jest?" he said with glee when asked
+to officiate. "Won'erful stuff, that 'ere, Miss!" he remarked at the
+close of the sad ceremony; adding, admiringly, "w'y, that ket did'nt
+mow once!" "What are you going to do with her?" I inquired of the
+youth, who now carried the corpse dangling by one leg. "Throw 'er over
+the fust garding wall I come to," he replied, grinning. Thus, I
+reflected, the poor London garden is still the victim!
+
+A dead cat may be an awkward visitor, but the surviving cats are the
+bane of London gardens. Their courtships--on the garden-wall--are long
+and musical, causing even the merciful to yearn for a syringe at all
+costs. The sparrows are a far lesser evil. They, indeed, eat the
+garden seeds; nothing on earth is sacred to a London sparrow or robin.
+It is impossible, by any system, however well-devised, to outwit them.
+They are afraid of nothing. Set up an elaborate scarecrow in the
+garden; for the space, perhaps, of one hour it will puzzle them; but
+in a day or two they will hop and twitter familiarly about it, even to
+the extent of pecking bits of thread from it for their impertinent
+nests. Get a toy cat and place it on the flower-bed; in twenty-four
+hours they will have discovered that the thing is a hollow sham, and
+will sit comfortably in the warmth of its artificial fur. But one
+forgives them; for the birds, after all, are the chief joy of London
+gardens. Their twitter is sweet on spring mornings; in winter, the
+robins and sparrows may be tamed by feeding, almost to the extent of
+coming into the house itself for crumbs; and, in the summer, if you
+set them a shallow bath every day for their disporting, they will
+rejoice your heart by their watery antics. Robins and sparrows are
+alike charming; the robins are the stronger; a single robin, pecking
+about on the garden step for his breakfast, will scatter a host of
+sparrows; but it is the sparrows, after all, that form the real bird
+population of London. Though they appreciate a quiet back garden, they
+seem also to delight in the noise, traffic, and bustle of the streets.
+Their cleverness, and their strength too, surpass belief; they even
+seem to have aesthetic tastes (did I not see, last month, a sparrow
+decorate its nest with an overhanging sprig of laburnum, or "golden
+chain?"); and they are, besides, as irrepressible as the London street
+arabs, with whom they have much in common; for they are the "gamins"
+of the bird world. For their parental instinct, on the other hand,
+there is, in London at least, not much to be said; their way of
+dealing with their recalcitrant offspring would seem to be a trifle
+overbearing, for in early spring small, half-fledged corpses are often
+to be found, dropped unkindly from nests into back-gardens. But,
+perhaps, as the small boy said of King Solomon, "havin' so many, they
+can afford to be wasteful of 'em." There are, indeed, many. On the
+statue of Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, in Russell Square,--a
+figure, rising erect, in the curious taste of the time, from a nest of
+cupids and clouds,--sparrows have built many nests. The chinks in the
+giant's robe are black, in spring, with their tiny heads; the curly
+hair of the cupids is fluffed with their downy feathers.
+
+I have elsewhere touched on the great picturesqueness of London
+views--a picturesqueness always more or less coloured and influenced
+by romance and by history: the past and the present, the natural and
+the artificial--all blended into one glory:--
+
+  "glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
+   ... the glory of going on, and still to be."
+
+Especially beautiful are the effects of light that are obtainable on
+early summer mornings, or on lurid, stormy, autumn evenings--evenings
+when the sun sinks with such splendour of attendant fires as is rarely
+seen away from the great city. The vivid effects are largely increased
+by the smoky atmosphere. What more mysteriously fine, for instance,
+than the view of St. Paul's, looking up Ludgate Hill, with, in the
+foreground, the railway bridge, emitting smoke, raised high above the
+narrow street: and the black, thin spirelet of St. Martin's, as the
+attendant "aiguille" leading the eye up to the colossal dome of grey
+St. Paul's?--
+
+  "Here, like a bishop, upon dainties fed,
+   St. Paul lifts up his sacerdotal head;
+   While his lean curates, slim and lank to view,
+   Around them point their steeples to the blue."
+
+Or what, on a fine morning of summer, can be more inspiring than the
+white and silver harmonies of Cheapside, dominated by the pale tower
+of St. Mary-le-Bow? Or the sublimity of the Houses of Parliament, that
+embattled mass with its tall tower, backed by stormy, gold-edged
+threatening clouds, through which the sunlight breaks? "Sky and cloud
+and smoke and buildings are all mingled as if they belonged to each
+other, and man's work stretching heavenward is touched with the
+sublimity of nature." Or Trafalgar Square, as I saw it lately, on a
+winter twilight; its tall pillars grey-black against a lurid sky, its
+fountain alchymised to a molten mass of pearl-white, its geysers to
+sparkling brilliants, a "nocturne" of silver and gold? Or the
+Turneresque brilliance of light and splendour on the river--that river
+to which London owes all her prosperity and all her fame--that river
+of which already, with true feeling and eighteenth-century
+artificiality, Alexander Pope wrote:--
+
+  "her figured streams in waves of silver rolled,
+   And on her banks Augusta rose in gold."
+
+But of all the views of London, perhaps none is so fine, and certainly
+none is so comprehensive, as that which may be obtained, under
+favourable conditions, from Primrose Hill--that "little molehill," as
+it has been called, "in the great wen's northern flank." It is a
+splendid and inspiring panorama. Few people know of it; yet it is a
+sight not to be forgotten. Go thither on a clear spring or summer
+evening, three-quarters of an hour before sunset, and you will be
+richly repaid. What a view! Grime and dinginess are as they were not;
+the smoky atmosphere is transformed, as if by magic, to a golden,
+transparent haze--mellowing, brightening, idealising. "Who," as a
+recent writer says, "would have imagined that this grimy, smoky
+wilderness of houses, with its factories and its slums, ... could ever
+look like the fair and beautiful city of some ethereal vision,
+embosomed in trees and full of glorious stately monuments? It is even
+so. Regent's Park lies below, a frame of restful greenery. To the left
+rises Camden Town--prosaic neighbourhood!--up a gentle slope. In the
+evening sunlight it is transfigured into a mass of brightness and
+colour, rising in clear-cut terraces, like some fair city on an
+Italian hill-top. St. Pancras Station is a thing of beauty, with a
+Gothic spire, and lines like those of a Venetian palazzo on the Grand
+Canal. Hard by rises the dome of the Reading-Room of the British
+Museum, embowered in trees--a stately witness to the learning of a
+continent. St. Paul's soars up grandly above its sister spires, in
+misty purple--dominating feature of the city--as St. Peter's in Rome.
+Away towards the mouth of the river rises the high line of Blackheath,
+and the hills of the Thames valley curve round in a noble sweep above
+the light haze which marks the unseen river, past the crest of
+Sydenham Hill with the Crystal Palace shining out white and clear,
+past Big Ben and the Abbey, and the Mother of Parliaments, to where
+the ridges above Guildford and Dorking fade away into 'the fringes of
+the southward-facing brow' of Sussex and Hampshire, towards the
+English Channel. Innumerable slender church spires point upwards to
+the wide overarching sky. Northward, again, are the wooded heights of
+Highgate and Hampstead, and the long battlemented line of the fortress
+at Holloway. What a view! On Primrose Hill on a summer's evening the
+Londoner feels, indeed, that he is a citizen of no mean city.
+Wordsworth, truly, thought that 'Earth had not anything to show more
+fair' than the view from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. But
+it needs a modern poet--a poet of the whole English-speaking race--to
+do justice to this view of the great city on the Thames, lying bathed
+in the magic glow of a summer sunset beneath Primrose Hill."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _A Jury._]
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE WAYS OF LONDONERS
+
+  "Laughing, weeping, hurrying ever,
+   Hour by hour they crowd along,
+   While below the mighty river
+   Sings them all a mocking song."--_Molloy._
+
+  "An ever-muttering prisoned storm,
+   The heart of London beating warm."--_John Davidson._
+
+
+[Illustration: _'Bus Driver._]
+
+What is the best way to see London? "From the top of a 'bus," Mr.
+Gladstone is said to have sagely remarked. And if you can study London
+itself from the top of a 'bus, you can also, from the interior of the
+same convenient, if not always savoury, vehicle, study the ways of
+Londoners. For, as means of transit, omnibuses and road-cars are every
+decade, nay, every year, coming yet more into popularity. Soon the
+patient horses that drag them will disappear and they will transform
+themselves into "motor-omnibuses," but their general character will be
+still unaltered. Whether the new electric railway along Oxford Street
+will at all affect the omnibus public, is a question to be considered;
+but up to now these popular vehicles have certainly had it all their
+own way. To the unsophisticated, there seems now even a dash of
+adventure about them. Why, it is only some twenty years since it was
+considered bold for a young woman to venture into that hitherto
+exclusively male precinct, the very select "knifeboard": and now, the
+top of a 'bus usually harbours not one, but a majority of females,
+while the uncomfortable "knifeboard" itself has given place to the
+luxurious "garden-seat." Then, it was in old days considered
+necessary to talk of "omnibuses," and now, 'bus is a term as common as
+"the Zoo," and used not only by "the masses," but even by purists in
+the English language.
+
+The ways of Londoners, then, as studied in the ubiquitous "'bus," are
+not at all the ways of any other people. To begin with, the stranger
+should be warned of the fact that the average Londoner resents being
+spoken to. He, or she, regards it as an unwarrantable liberty. For the
+Londoner,--at any rate that Londoner whose honour it is to belong to
+the great and respectable "middle class," prides himself on "keeping
+'isself _to_ 'isself." He, or, again, it is generally she,--is nothing
+if not conventional, and dreads nothing in life so much as the
+unexpected. If, therefore, you should show such bad taste as to
+suddenly die in the 'bus, or in the street, a dirty crowd would, it is
+true, soon collect round you, but the more respectable would, like the
+Levite, "pass by on the other side," preferring "not to mix themselves
+up with any unpleasantness." "People in London are so rude," I
+remarked once sadly to a "lady friend" of mine who lived in a "two
+pair back" in a select mews: "Wyever _do_ you speak to 'em?" was her
+retort--evidently on the principle that you can't expect anything from
+a wolf but a bite.
+
+But the lowest classes are more genial. They have not got such an
+overpowering amount of gentility to keep up. They can even afford to
+be sympathetic. Once I happened to have to ring up a doctor in the
+small hours of the morning. Hardly had I pulled twice at the midnight
+bell, when with Gamp-like alacrity two strange figures hurried up, and
+inquired with breathless anxiety, "Anyone pizened, Miss?" adding, with
+knowledge born of experience, "Knock at the winder." The advice was at
+all events opportune. Yes, the very poor have always a certain rude,
+Dickensian, good nature. Thus, if an old market-woman, for instance,
+happen to jump into your 'bus at Covent Garden, she will amiably rest
+her big (and distinctly savoury) basket half on your knees, and,
+mopping her crimson face with a dishcloth, "pass" you the time of day.
+On the other hand, a great lady and her fashionably dressed daughter
+will (if you happen to offer your own place for their acceptance) take
+it without so much as "thank you," and will then proceed to eye you
+superciliously through a lorgnette. Truly, our manners do not improve,
+in all respects, with our social status.
+
+Max O'Rell, in _John Bull and his Island_, has well hit off the
+Englishman's little ways when travelling by omnibus:
+
+     "Ask John Bull if you are in the right for such and such a
+     place; you will get _yes_ or _no_ for an answer, and nothing
+     more. When he enters an omnibus or a railway carriage, if he
+     does not recognise any one, he eyes his fellow travellers
+     askance in a sulky and suspicious way. He seems to say,
+     'What a bore it is that all you people can't walk home, and
+     let a man have the carriage comfortably to himself....'
+     London omnibuses are made to seat six persons on each side.
+     These places are not marked out. When, on entering, you find
+     five people on either hand, you must not hope to see any one
+     move to make room for you. No, here everything is left to
+     personal initiative. You simply try to spy out the two pairs
+     of thighs that seem to you the best padded, and with all
+     your weight you let yourself down between them. No need to
+     apologise, no one will think of calling you a bad name."
+
+There is much character to be met with in a 'bus. The incipient or
+embryo novelist should be encouraged to travel by them. From the time
+when the poet Shelley frightened the Highgate old lady in a 'bus, by
+his odd invitation to:
+
+                        "sit upon the ground,
+  And tell strange stories of the death of kings...."
+
+--many romances have been enacted, many curious histories related in
+them. Omnibuses have before now been utilised as meeting-grounds for
+young couples whose courtship was tabooed by unkind parents, and who
+consequently discovered pressing engagements requiring their presence
+at "Hercules Buildings," or "the Elephant," as the case might be. Mr.
+Anstey Guthrie's amusing conversations, overheard in the 'bus, and
+his intense anxiety as to the never discovered _denoument_ of the
+thrilling story about "the button-hook as opened George's eyes," we
+have all known and laughed over. But the omnibus,--mere comedy on a
+bright, dusty, spring or summer day, when its garden-seats shine
+resplendent in new paint, becomes rather a thing of grim tragedy on
+muddy days of winter gloom, when the rain comes down in torrents, and
+a stern "Full inside," is all the response the weary wayfarer gets
+after waiting long minutes,--painful, jostled minutes,--for the
+desired vehicle, of which, as Calverley says:
+
+                    "... some, like monarchs, glow
+  With richest purple; some are blue
+  As skies that tempt the swallows back.
+  Or red as, seen o'er wintry seas,
+  The star of storm; or barred with black
+  And yellow, like the April bees."
+
+The omnibus conductors are generally uncommunicative, and often
+morose--perhaps, from too frequent digs in the ribs from fussy old
+ladies and choleric old gentlemen. Some of them, too, refuse to wait
+for you unless you pretend to have a broken leg, or at least to be
+half-paralyzed; yet, even among 'bus conductors, there are still
+occasional pearls to be met with. In one thing they show remarkable
+aptitude; namely, in an interchange of wit with the drivers of rival
+vehicles. On these occasions their sallies, considering their very
+limited vocabulary, are often quite brilliantly forcible. In a "block"
+in Oxford Street or the Strand, or after a "liquor-up" at a convenient
+"pub," such flights of humour will often while away the time very
+agreeably for the passenger inside, that is, if he be not too
+nervously fearful of being drawn into the dispute himself. Omnibus
+conductors, however, "frivel" as they may among themselves, are as
+adamant where any infringement of their rules by their passengers is
+concerned. Why they continually insist--against all show of reason
+too--on seating no less than six fat people on one side of their
+vehicle, and no more than six thin ones on the other, has always been
+a mystery to me. It is, however, as a law of the Medes and Persians,
+for it knows no alteration. But it has at any rate the merit of
+pointing the parable about the fat and the lean kine.
+
+[Illustration: _Inside._]
+
+Fat people, it must be confessed, have a peculiar affinity for
+omnibuses. The contents of a 'bus are, I have observed, nearly always
+fat. An omnibus journey is, by the obese, regarded as so much
+exercise. An old tradesman of my acquaintance who suffered from liver
+was lately ordered exercise by his doctor. Thereupon he took, like
+Mrs. Carlyle, one sad shilling's worth of omnibus per day, and was
+surprised when, at the end of a month, he felt no better. "One
+shilling's worth of omnibus!"--horrible suggestion! It must have taken
+nearly three hours, for the cost of omnibus journeys can generally be
+reckoned at a penny for every ten minutes. The distance traversed is
+immaterial, as the traveller will soon discover. If he wishes to catch
+any particular train he had better allow twenty minutes a mile to be
+quite on the safe side.
+
+On rainy days, character in omnibus is yet more self-revealing. Thus,
+a wayfarer gets in with a wet cloak and wet umbrella; no one shows any
+desire to make room. The five lean kine on the one side spread
+themselves out; the five fat ones on the other expand also. The
+new-comer stumbles, the wet cloak splashes every one, the umbrella
+drips genially; it is a pleasant sight. When room is finally made and
+the wanderer seated, the wet garments soon exhale a fragrant
+steam--which scent mingles with the odours of cabbage, peppermint, or
+onions, already discernible. These scents, it may be added, vary in
+different quarters of London. Thus, onions are partial to Long Acre;
+antiseptics to Southampton Row; cheap scent to Oxford Street and
+Holborn; whisky, perhaps, to "the 'Ampstid Road"; general frowsiness
+to King's Road, Chelsea; and the aroma of elegant furs to the shades
+of Kensington. Omnibus scents vary, too, with "the varying year." In
+the spring it is leeks and "spring onions"; in the winter it is
+paraffin or eucalyptus; in the summer it is indescribable.
+
+Yet, it must be said on behalf of human nature, that there is kindness
+to be met with even in the maligned 'bus. If, for instance, some
+"absent-minded beggar" should happen to get in without possessing the
+necessary pence, at least half the 'bus are immediately ready to offer
+the deficit; and hands are similarly always stretched out to help in
+the lame and the blind.
+
+[Illustration: _"Benk, Benk!!"_]
+
+Even should a fellow passenger be exceptionally conversational, it
+does not, I may add, usually answer to talk much to the casual
+neighbour on a 'bus, even if it be by way of ingratiating yourself
+with "the masses." Especially does this rule hold good where young
+women are concerned. A seriously-minded girl--a girl, too, who was not
+a bit of a flirt, or indeed remarkably pretty--once confessed to me
+her sad experiences in that line. Being much interested in democratic
+politics, she had one fine day begun to talk--on the 'bus roof--to a
+young artisan on the "Eight Hours' Bill." She imagined herself to be
+getting along swimmingly, when suddenly the young man, hitherto very
+intelligent and respectful, began to "nudge" her (this being, I have
+reason to believe, the first preliminary to courtship in his class).
+From "nudging" he proceeded to "squeezing"; and, finally, could it be
+fancy, or was it an arm that began ominously to encircle her waist?
+She did not stay to investigate the phenomenon, but clambered down the
+iron staircase with inelegant haste--a sadder and a wiser young woman!
+
+Another time I myself was "riding," as the Cockneys term it, on the
+outside of a 'bus towards the sylvan park of Kennington, and, fired no
+doubt by the lovely summer day, began--with more enthusiasm than
+prudence--to discuss current topics with my neighbour on the "garden
+seat." He was a well-mannered youth, and for a while I was much
+edified by his conversation--until, that is, his sudden interjection
+of "There's a taisty 'at a-crawsin' of the rowd," in some inexplicable
+manner cooled me off.
+
+Carlyle was a constant traveller by 'bus, which economy, it may be,
+agreed well with his Scotch thriftiness. Mrs. Carlyle, on one of her
+solitary returns to their Chelsea home, describes him as meeting her
+by the omnibus, scanning the passengers (like the Peri at the gate)
+from under his well-known old white hat. This white hat, even in
+Carlyle's day, used to attract attention. "Queer 'at the old gent
+wears," once remarked an unconsciously irreverent passenger to the
+conductor of the Chelsea omnibus. "Queer 'at," retorted the conductor
+reprovingly; "it may be a queer 'at, but what would you give for the
+'ed-piece that's inside of it?"
+
+Cabs are vastly more luxurious than omnibuses, but are to be rigidly
+eschewed by the economical, except in cases where time is of as much
+value as money. The fact is, that it is almost necessary to overpay
+cabmen, and especially so if the "fare" be at all nervous. Hence it
+has been said with some truth, that life, to be at all worth living in
+London, should disregard extra sixpences. People of the Jonas
+Chuzzlewit type may, indeed, take cabs to their utmost shilling
+limits, but this is a proceeding hardly to be recommended to the
+sensitive. For the average cabman is prodigal in retort, and not
+generally reticent on the subject of imagined wrong. In the season
+overpaying is more than ever necessary, while hiring "by the hour" is,
+at least by the nervous, to be deprecated. The familiar device of
+paying one penny per minute, though fair enough in fact, has been
+characterised as "only possible to the hardened Londoner." Some people
+make a practice of only overpaying the cabman when, like John Gilpin,
+they are "on pleasure bent"; yet I do not know how the cabman is
+supposed to divine their mission.
+
+The hansom--"the gondola of London," as Disraeli called it--is far
+preferable to the antiquated "four-wheeler" or "growler," a vehicle
+which has never been really popular since Wainwright murdered Harriet
+Lane, and inconsiderately carried about her mutilated body in one of
+these conveyances, tied up in American cloth. True, hansoms have their
+faults. Thus the hansom horse is sometimes afflicted with a mania for
+going round and round in a manner which suggests his having been
+brought up in a circus. Sometimes he does nothing but twist his head
+back to look at his fare; sometimes he persists on turning into every
+"mews" he passes; sometimes he jibs in a way altogether distracting to
+a nervous passenger who can only, for the moment, behold the horse and
+the driver; but still there is a "smartness" about the well-turned-out
+hansom that cannot be gainsaid. The acme of smartness is, perhaps, a
+private hansom with a liveried driver; these, however, are
+exclusively seen in the haunts of fashion. It is, perhaps, well for
+the London resident to be liberally inclined, for in an incredibly
+short space of time his or her "ways" become known to the cab-driving
+community, and facilities for getting cabs largely depend on their
+verdict. It may be added that if the hansom-driver is inclined to be
+pert (a natural inclination, considering the height of his elevation
+above the general public), more generally the "growler" is morose, and
+given to a huskiness that is suggestive of that abode of light and
+polished brass--the "poor man's club."
+
+[Illustration: _The Hansom._]
+
+The visitors to London vary, like the omnibus scents, with the varying
+year. In the spring and early summer, it is the fashionable world that
+mainly haunts its streets; in the later summer, the French, Italians,
+Germans--especially Germans--flock with everlasting red Baedekers
+(indeed, in the London streets in August, you but rarely hear your own
+language spoken); in autumn, it is chiefly Americans who abound,
+provided with all "Europe" in the compass of one guide-book; in
+January the country cousins, and thrifty housewives generally, come up
+for the day, armed with lists of alarming length, to swell the crowds
+at the winter sales.
+
+One of the things that strikes the foreigner, new to England and
+England's ways, most in London, is the regulation of the street
+traffic. The innumerable vehicles that throng the highways of London,
+every moment threatening, or seeming to threaten, a "block"; the
+continuous rumble of many wheels,--omnibuses, cabs, drays, vans,
+bicycles, motors,--all these, an apparently limitless force, are
+stopped, as if by magic, by "the man in blue" simply holding up an
+arm. All power, for the moment, is vested in him; he is here the one
+authority against which there is no appeal. Under the protection of
+the policeman's aegis, the most timid foot-passenger may pass in
+perfect security; the flood will be stayed while his arm, like that of
+Moses of old, is raised. And there is no such thing as disobedience.
+Be the bicyclist never so bold, be the hansom-driver never so smart,
+woe betide him if he disobey the mandate! Under the policeman's
+faithful pilotage, the big crossings are safe; danger only lurks in
+the smaller ones, where his presence is not felt. The "man in blue"
+is, generally, a charming and urbane personage; if, in the exercise of
+his calling, he sometimes chance to develop a certain curtness, it is,
+perhaps, that he has in his time been overmuch badgered.... His
+urbanity, as a rule, is marvellous; and in great contrast to that of
+his continental brethren. In Germany, the officer of the law shakes
+his list in people's faces; in France, he gesticulates wildly; in
+Italy, he is timid and ineffectual; in England, he merely raises his
+arm, and behold! like the gods on Olympus, he is obeyed.
+
+Londoners are a curiously callous race, and are, as has been shown,
+remarkably little interested in their neighbours. The fact is, their
+life is much too busy for such interest. In the country, your
+neighbours know everything you do, your business, your position, your
+income even. In London, all that your neighbours know of you is that
+you come and that you go; and, once gone, your place knows you no
+more. Miss Amy Levy, who, more than any other poet, has expressed the
+feeling of London streets, puts the idea well, in these most pathetic
+lines:
+
+  "They trod the streets and squares where now I tread,
+   With weary hearts, a little while ago;
+   When, thin and grey, the melancholy snow
+   Clung to the leafless branches overhead;
+   Or when the smoke-veiled sky grew stormy-red
+   In autumn; with a re-arisen woe
+   Wrestled, what time the passionate spring winds blow;
+   And paced scorched stones in summer;--they are dead.
+
+  "The sorrow of their souls to them did seem
+   As real as mine to me, as permanent.
+   To-day, it is the shadow of a dream,
+   The half-forgotten breath of breezes spent.
+   So shall another soothe his woe supreme--
+   No more he comes, who this way came and went."
+                                         (_A London Plane-Tree._)
+
+The Londoner dies--the great bell of St. Pancras may toll out his
+sixty years, or the deep tones of Westminster call to his memorial
+service; yet none the less a dance is given at the house next door,
+and the immediate neighbours know not of the death until they see the
+hearse and the long row of funereal trappings. Truly was it said, that
+in a crowd is ever the greatest solitude! The mighty pulse of London,
+that
+
+  "Of your coming and departure heeds,
+   As the Seven Seas may heed a pebble cast,"
+
+beats on just the same though you are gone. The vast machine grinds
+out its daily life, the propellers work, the wheels of Juggernaut
+hum, while, like a poor moth, you spin your little hour in the sun,
+and then go under. This terrible desolation of London has resulted,
+and still results, in many a tragedy, bitter as that of young
+Chatterton, the boy poet, found dead in a Brooke Street garret:
+
+                ... "the marvellous boy,
+  The sleepless soul that perished in his pride...."
+
+[Illustration: _A Doorstep Party._]
+
+London, the "stony-hearted stepmother," as De Quincey called Oxford
+Street--has many a time given her children stones for bread. Many are
+the men and women, poets, authors, journalists, actors, who come up to
+the vast city, attracted by "the deceitful lights of London," to
+starve in Soho or Bloomsbury garrets (Bloomsbury, to which place, it
+is said, more MSS. are returned than to any other locality in the
+British Isles). Too proud to beg, too sensitive to fight, they soon
+become ousted in the struggle for life, and very often get pushed
+altogether out of the ranks; or, if they do succeed, are soured by
+years of trial and suffering. The biographies of successful men
+sometimes tell of such early struggles: but of the many who are not
+successful, the submerged ones, you do not hear. Some of the
+Bloomsbury and Bayswater boarding-houses afford sad evidence of
+retrenched fortunes and squalid lives. The ragged window blind, the
+dirty tablecloth, covered always with remains of meals; the sad,
+lined, discontented faces pressed close to the dingy panes, the
+eternal smell of onions or fried fish, the general wretchedness and
+frowsiness of everything--all tell tales of a sadder kind than those
+of Dickens's Mrs. Tibbs or Mrs. Todgers. And, descending yet lower in
+the social scale, individual cases become yet sadder. I once lived in
+a London square, next door to an empty house. For two days a battered
+corpse lay on the other side of the wall, in the garden, and no one
+knew of it. It was only the poor caretaker left in the "mansion" who,
+weary of existence, had herself severed the Gordian knot of life. And,
+in the immediate neighbourhood of another square of "desirable
+residences," no less than three murders was considered the usual
+winter average--murders, too, of the worst and most squalid type.
+Such, in London, is the close juxtaposition of "velvet and rags,"
+luxury and misery. London is the refuge of blighted lives, of the
+queer flotsam and jetsam of humanity. Where can they all come from?
+and what were their beginnings? Among such waifs and strays do I
+recall one old man--feeble, pitiful, wizened, who carried an empty
+black bag, and stretched it out towards me appealingly. The contents,
+if any, of the black bag, I never discovered; but I often gave him a
+penny, simply because he was so unutterably pathetic. He is gone now,
+and his place knows him no more. But he always haunts my dreams. And
+the afflicted girl--white-faced and expressionless--who sat for many
+years close to the "Horse-Shoe" of Tottenham Court Road (indeed, she
+may sit there still), her face calm as that of a Caryatid, as though
+oblivious of Time and inured to suffering, through all the noise and
+tumult of drovers' carts and omnibuses; she has often seemed to me as
+a type of the eternal, dumb sorrow of humanity.
+
+Yet this isolation of London, terrible as it is for the poor and
+suffering,--is,--for the well-to-do class at least,--in some ways
+advantageous. For one thing, it allows more liberty of action;--for
+another, it prevents any undue personal pride. It is, fortunately,
+rare indeed for the individual to be as conceited in London as he is
+in the provinces. True,--London has occasional aesthetic crazes and
+literary fashions; but, as a rule,--and with the exception of special
+cliques and coteries such as those of Chelsea and Hampstead,--people
+are not unduly puffed up in London. The city, with its vast size, acts
+as an automatic equaliser;--personality becomes lost,--and individuals
+tend to find their proper level. The Londoner is apt to
+realise,--that, in the words of Mr. Gilbert's song,--"he never would
+be missed." Nowhere is there more liberty; no one even notices you as
+you walk the streets. A man used, some years ago, to walk about the
+Bloomsbury squares with long hair in be-ribboned pigtails, and in a
+harlequin dress; the street-boys hardly marked him; even a Chinaman in
+full costume only attracts a following of a few nursery-maids and
+perambulators. But in London it really matters very little what you
+do, or how you dress. Dress here is in fact immaterial, unless you are
+bent on social successes. Eyes are not for ever scanning you
+critically, as they do in country villages. And, for ladies who work
+in slums and "mean streets,"--the safest plan is always to wear dark,
+shabby, and quiet clothes--clothes that do not "assert themselves."
+Otherwise, it is likely that she may be accosted as "dear" or
+"Sally,"--invited to take "a drop o' tea," or otherwise chaffed by
+rough women standing akimbo at street doors. This practice of standing
+at doors and gossiping would appear, indeed, to be the main occupation
+of women of the lower class; but, poor things! they enjoy it; and
+their life, after all, must contain but few enjoyments. It is perhaps,
+less certain that their babies enjoy the "cold step," on which they
+are unceremoniously flopped at all hours of the day. An overdose of
+"cold step" may, indeed, partially account for the bronchitis which
+riddles the ranks of the children of the poor. You may see a family of
+six slum children playing happily in the damp gutter one week; the
+week following, you may find half of them dead or dying from a
+visitation of this fell plague. To say that the children of London are
+decimated by it would be putting the case much too mildly. The
+mothers, however, take a different view. "She niver looked 'erself
+agin sence that 'ere crool vaccination,"--a mother will say
+placidly,--ignoring the cold step and the bronchitis that did the
+work. "Cold step," indeed, to their minds, acts as a refreshing tonic;
+they call it "bringin' 'im,--or 'er,--up 'ardy."
+
+That "pity for a horse o'erdriven" that often catches you by the
+throat in London streets,--is yet almost cast into the shade by the
+far sadder lot of helpless humanity. 'Bus horses, at any rate, are
+well fed,--to say nothing of their being worn out, and released from
+their sufferings after an average period of four years; besides, you
+can always comfort yourself by refusing to travel by 'bus (I have a
+friend, indeed, who always vows that he will NOT on any consideration
+make one of twenty-eight people for two horses to pull);--but it is
+little or nothing you can do for the alleviation of the lot of the
+slum babies. Sad indeed is the case of some of these. For, in some
+dingy and romantically-named "Rose Lane,"--or "Marigold-Avenue,"--(the
+filthier the London lanes, the more poetic their names),--baby-farms
+flourish and spread. Once, I remember coming home sick at heart, from
+a visitation of one such slummy "lane." In a dirty "two-pair back" I
+found an old woman of witch-like aspect and doubtful sobriety, three
+mangy cats, and two miserable "farmed" babies,--one an infant,
+wretched, scrofulous, and covered with sores, lying on a dirty flock
+bed, its eyes half-closed, in the last stage of exhaustion;--the other
+a girl of two, wasted and cadaverous, sitting on the usual "cold
+step," and gazing with pathetic and suffering eyes over to the
+cabbage-laden and redolent gutter that, filthier far than any in
+Italian town or foreign Ghetto, apparently did duty, in the middle of
+the paved alley, as a common dustbin. (Truly, it well becomes us to
+decry,--in this matter of cleanliness, our neighbours of Central
+Europe!) I went away sadly; yet what could I have done? I could not
+take the poor neglected babies home; even though they probably
+belonged to girls who were not too regular in paying for their weekly
+maintenance. Nothing short of bringing in the Law would have been of
+any use, and I was not sure enough of my facts to do this. Yet that
+elder child's pathetic and mournfully patient eyes still afflict my
+memory.
+
+Poor, little, neglected slum children! Miss Dorothy Tennant (Lady
+Stanley), has by her unique art surrounded these waifs with all that
+glamour of poetry and sentiment that had, by a foolish custom, been
+hitherto exclusively reserved for the children of the rich. Even Du
+Maurier always made his slum children ugly and repulsive. Nature,
+however, knows no such differences. And,--apart from Miss Dorothy
+Tennant's charming ragamuffins,--who has not stopped to admire, in
+some back street, the graceful dancing of some half-dozen of small
+ragged girls? girls in shocking shoes,--but who, nevertheless, hop so
+delightfully, and with such sense of time and rhythm, to the wheezy
+old organ, the wheeziest of its tribe, that they have inveigled into
+their custom. Indeed, I have sometimes doubted whether the organ-man
+does not himself engage the small girls to dance, as a catch-penny
+_ruse_. They do difficult, intricate, ever-changing steps:
+
+                  "advance, evade,
+  Unite, dispart, and dally,
+  Re-set, coquet, and gallopade,"
+
+as Mr. Austin Dobson hath it.
+
+It is not, indeed, only in hospital wards that the children of the
+great city are pathetic. I have been moved (like Mrs. Meagles), almost
+to tears, at the sight of a big Ragged School of small boys marching,
+ten abreast, in perfect drill, in a large phalanx, numbering about
+five hundred. Five hundred unwanted little human souls! each child, of
+infant years, with no mother to love it; more destitute in a way than
+even the slum baby, regarded as a cipher merely; it is surely a sight
+pitiful enough to make the angels weep!
+
+[Illustration: _Hop-scotch._]
+
+All the street child's usual stock in-trade, in the way of toys, is
+chalk (for drawing those incessant white squares on the pavement),
+perhaps a few worn marbles, and a selection of old buttons. The
+chalked squares, of course, refer to the ancient game of "hop-scotch,"
+so called because the player in trying to get a stone into a square,
+may only "hop" over the lines which are "scotched" or "traced" on the
+ground. The London children often use, instead of stones, broken bits
+of glass or crockery they call "chaneys"; and to own a private
+"chaney" is considered, I believe, highly genteel. The familiar game
+of "Tip-cat," and the skipping rope, have rival attractions; and great
+enjoyment may be derived from a primitive swing--a bit of rope deftly
+fixed between area rails or on lamp-posts. The pavement is the London
+child's playground, for, though in some quarters a movement has, I
+believe, been started for opening some few of the select "squares" to
+poor children at certain days and hours, it would not appear to have
+done much as yet. The pavement games and the Board Schools together
+often produce a quite wonderful arithmetical sharpness: "The idea of
+Em'ly gittin' a prize," I heard a ragged girl of tender years remark
+contemptuously to her equally ragged companion, "_Em'ly!_ why, the
+girl's a perfect fool; past ten year owld, and can't move the decimal
+point!" Like other children, these little pariahs of the street have
+their "make-believe" games; for instance, I have seen them look
+longingly into toy-shop windows, and heard them talk to each other of
+every article there, as though it were their own peculiar property; I
+have also overheard them, sitting on a West-End doorstep, appropriate
+the mansion thus: "Ain't this 'ere a fine 'ouse, M'ria? didn't know as
+yer ma was sich a toff. When are y'going to arst me in to tea?" &c.,
+&c. What matter if they pepper their speech continually with such
+cockneyisms as "not me," "chawnce it," "you ain't no class"; they are
+generally sweet English children all the same, and immeasurably
+superior to their surroundings. And such surroundings as they are!
+
+     "Our street" (as a little Board School boy described his
+     home in an essay), "is a long lane betwixt two big streets.
+     Our street is not so clean as the big streets, coz yer
+     mothers throws the slops and things in the gutter, and
+     chucks bits of _Lloyds_ and cabbige leaves in the middle of
+     the road. That's why there's allus a funny smell down our
+     street, speshally when it's hot."
+
+Another such essay thus describes a London "Bank Holiday":
+
+     "They call this happy day Bank Holiday, becose the banks
+     shut up shop, so as people can't put their money in, but has
+     to spend it. People begin talking about Bank Holiday a long
+     time afore it comes, but they don't begin to spree about
+     much till the night afore.... Bank Holidays are the happiest
+     days of your life, becose you can do nearly what you like,
+     and the perlice don't take no notice of you.... There's only
+     one thing as spoils Bank Holiday, and that is not being fine
+     and hot. When it's wet all the gentlemen get savige and
+     fight one another, and pull their sweetarts and missises
+     about. I'm very sorry for them all round, becose it is a
+     shame for to see. But when it's fine and hot, the gentlemen
+     all larf and are kind, and the women dance about and drink
+     beer like the gentlemen. Everybody's right, and boys don't
+     get skittled round."
+
+But, of course, the Board Schools have done, and are doing, much to
+improve the rising generation. It is no small tribute to them that
+into whatever slum or rough district you elect to go, you are safe if
+you surround yourself with a bodyguard of street children. And for the
+matter of that, even that pariah of the schools, the London street
+arab, is with his "pluck" and general resourcefulness, distinctly
+attractive. Have not Dickens and other novelists adopted him as their
+hero? All honour to him if he outgrow his base surroundings; small
+wonder if he is like poor Tip, "of the prison prisonous and of the
+streets streety." Quickwitted, idle, and hardened to privation, he
+may, when he grows up, turn to honest work, or he may sink into a
+"loafer,"--one of those mysterious beings who arise, as out of thin
+air, from the empty street whenever a four wheel cab, with its burden
+of boxes, arrives at its destination.
+
+[Illustration: _The Return, Bank Holiday._]
+
+The conversation of the London working man hardly, perhaps, shows him
+at his best. The familiar but very unpleasant adjective that
+invariably greets your ears as you walk behind him, is in the main its
+distinguishing element, and, notwithstanding its more or less
+classical derivation (from "by'r Lady"), it is somewhat too suggestive
+for squeamish ears. Besides, from the frequency of its use, it would
+appear to mean nothing at all, but simply to be a foolish habit that
+cannot even plead the excuse of Cockneyism.
+
+What, by-the-way, is the derivation of the term "Cockney"? Its
+beginnings, as usual in etymological questions, are abstruse; for
+instance, the word began by meaning a "a cockered child"; then it was
+synonymous for "a milksop," "an effeminate fellow"; then, (16th
+cent.), "a derisive appellation for a townsman as the type of
+effeminacy, in contrast to the hardier inhabitants of the country."
+Then it became "one born in the city of London, within sound of Bow
+Bells"; a Bow-Bell Cockney being always a term "more or less
+contemptuous or bantering, and particularly used to connote the
+characteristics in which the born Londoner is supposed to be inferior
+to other Englishmen."
+
+     According, however, to an old writer, the term "cockney"
+     arose thus: "A Cittizen's sonne riding with his father into
+     the Country, asked when he heard a horse neigh, what the
+     horse did; his father answered, the horse doth neigh; riding
+     further he heard a cocke crow, and said, doth the _cocke
+     neigh_ too? and therefore Cockney or Cocknie, by inversion
+     thus: _incock_, q. _incoctus_, i., raw or unripe in
+     Country-man's affaires."
+
+Some Cockneyisms are frankly puzzling, some are actually startling.
+Factory girls are specially prodigal of them. Now, the average factory
+girl is often rather a rough diamond, but there is really no harm in
+her when once you get used to her ways. She has, it is true, an
+embarrassing habit of shouting into the ear of the inoffensive
+passer-by; she may even (if she happen, as frequently occurs, to be
+walking with two others, three abreast) try to push you into the
+gutter; but this is simply her fresh exuberance of spirits; she means
+no ill by it. And her frank utterances are not always rudely meant.
+For instance, the Cockney remark, "You are a fine old corf-drop, you
+are!" may even leave the person addressed in some bewilderment as to
+whether it be a compliment or an insult. It means, however, merely,
+that you are an "innocent," an ignoramus, a tyro in the ways of the
+world. "'Ere's a fine fourpenny lot!" or "Where did you get that 'at?"
+seem, on the other hand, to sound a more distinctly aggressive note.
+Next to factory-girls and flower-girls, costermongers talk, perhaps,
+the raciest "cockney." I once knew an old flower-man with a wonderful
+gift of the gab, who was always persuading me to sell him my husband's
+old boots, or "a' old skirt for the missus" for some pot of
+depressed-looking fern. "Did y' ever see sich fine plants?" he will
+cry admiringly of his barrow-full; "all growed up in cold air, I don't
+tell you no story. Wy, a gent larst year as kep' a mews, 'e bought a
+box 'o stershuns orf o' me, an' this year 'e come back an' said as 'e
+didn't wawnt no more o' that sort, cos wy? they blowed too well, they
+did, and made 'is winders look that toffy, as 'is landlord see 'em,
+and 'is rent wus riz on 'im. Now, this 'ere cherry-pie, you niver see
+sich bewties, got real stalks an' roots, _they_ 'ave; been kep' warm
+under the children's bed, down our court; 102, Little Red Fox Yard;
+kep' in they wuz, cos of the rain; and blimy if they don't look all
+the better for it!"
+
+The flower-girls have perhaps less voluble "patter," but their cry,
+"Fine Market Bunch!" "'Ere y'are!" is no less patiently reiterated.
+The London flower-girl, good-looking as she often is, is yet, perhaps,
+hardly an ideal embodiment of the goddess Flora. To begin with, she is
+generally enveloped in a thick, rough, unromantic, fringed shawl, and
+wears an enormous black hat with a still more enormous feather, the
+latter in sad need of curling. Her abundant hair is coiled loosely on
+to the nape of her neck, and hangs, in a thick black fringe, over her
+eyes and ears; anything more totally unlike the dainty, slim, Venetian
+flower-girl can hardly be imagined. Some kind ladies did, indeed, get
+up a benevolent scheme for providing London flower-sellers with neat
+dresses, bonnets, and hats; two or three women, garbed in this
+costume, may still occasionally be seen at London's principal
+flower-mart, Oxford Circus. But Londoners are a conservative race, and
+it is, I imagine, doubtful if the recipients themselves much
+appreciate these gifts.
+
+[Illustration: _Flower Girls._]
+
+The organ-grinders who delight so many humble folk, and enrage and
+afflict so many of the richer class, mostly hail from Hatton Garden
+and its immediate neighbourhood. The street organ,--"piano-organ" as
+its proud possessor generally terms it,--is usually the sole support
+of the family. The organ-grinders are, as a rule, Italian; and are
+generally to be seen in their picturesque native costume. The organ,
+however, requires, to catch many pennies, one, at least, of two useful
+adjuncts; viz., a baby in a cradle, or a dressed-up monkey. The baby
+sleeps peacefully through the noisiest tunes (what nerves of iron that
+child must possess!), the monkey dances and postures, even climbing up
+the area railings. Even in places where the organ-man is cursed, he
+often reaps a rich harvest of pennies, paid him to go away. Each organ
+has its special "pitches," its settled rounds. Thus, coming early from
+Hatton Garden, they will frequent Bloomsbury, say at 9 A.M., and work
+slowly towards the West End and back, to give the boarding houses in
+Bedford Place yet another serenade by the light of the setting sun.
+When once started, the organ-man is pitiless in giving you his whole
+repertoire. Poor John Leech! it is said that they helped to aggravate
+the lingering illness of which he died. But there can be no doubt that
+they lighten the drab, unlovely lives of the London poor.
+
+  "Children, when they see thy supple
+   Form approach, are out like shots;
+   Half-a-bar sets several couple
+   Waltzing in convenient spots.
+
+  "Not with clumsy Jacks or Georges;
+   Unprofaned by grasp of man
+   Maidens speed those simple orgies
+   Betsey Jane with Betsey Ann."
+
+German bands at street corners,--drum-and-fife bands organised by
+local talent,--all help, at nightfall, to swell the vast volume of the
+noise of London.
+
+There is one day in the week, however, when silence--a silence that
+can almost be oppressive--hangs over the entire city, and not even the
+sound of the organ-grinder varies the dulness of the monotonous
+streets. This is Sunday, a day which strikes terror to the heart of
+the uninitiated foreigner. M. Gabriel Mourey thus feelingly describes
+it:
+
+     "That English Sunday, which so exasperates the French, gives
+     them, from mere recollection, an attack of the spleen, a fit
+     of yawning.... Yet to me there is something comforting about
+     it. It is really a day of rest, of compulsory rest, of rest
+     against one's will; a day when it is simply impossible to do
+     otherwise than rest; it is an obligatory imprisonment which
+     at first revolts the prisoner, but which, if he control his
+     feelings, he will, at the end of an hour or so, find not
+     without its charm. To know for certain that no whim, no
+     fancy for outside amusement can distract you, no theatrical
+     temptation, no yearning for active life can assail you, to
+     be assured that you are protected from the Unforeseen, be it
+     happy or sad, from a letter even--that, in short, it is for
+     the moment impossible to do anything _useful_,--all this
+     gives you a tranquil security, a serene and healthful calm
+     of twenty-four hours, a calm of which we in France, and
+     especially of Paris, do not know the boon.... And if, in the
+     evening, you venture on to the deserted streets, you can
+     pass freely on your way; no one will interrupt your walk; it
+     is like a dead city; all trace of the life and activity of
+     the six past days has vanished."'
+
+And here is another, and a still more depressing picture, from the
+same author:
+
+     "In this immense and respectable cemetery into which London
+     is metamorphosed on Sundays, some characteristic and amusing
+     beggars patrol the streets. Two old people, a man and his
+     wife, stop at a street corner. The man takes a wretched
+     violin out of an old black cloth bag. The woman sings. What
+     a voice! a hungry voice of chilly misery, which issues,
+     bitter and shrill, from her toothless mouth. Though the
+     weather is warm, she seems to shiver beneath her ragged
+     shawl. The violin grates on obstinately. The man is tall,
+     with a kind of remains of grandeur in his torn coat-tails,
+     and in his face, still haughty, though greasy and bloated.
+     Some passers-by have stopped, and some pence have dropped
+     into the old woman's dirty, wasted hand. The man, still
+     drawing his violin bow, looks round, satisfied, on the
+     treasure.... Six o'clock strikes from a steeple near; they
+     suddenly desist, she from her singing, he from the scraping
+     of his miserable instrument, and they go off to swell the
+     little crowd which awaits, at the public-house doors, the
+     sixth stroke of six,--the re-opening of the house where
+     drunkenness, the cure of hunger-pain, is to be cheaply
+     bought."
+
+Such tragedies, such pitiful sights, wring the heart every day,
+"whene'er I take my walks abroad" in the streets of London. "How the
+poor live," indeed! Some of the London waifs would find it hard to
+tell you how they do live! The day often divided between the street
+and the public-house; the night, perhaps, spent in the shelter of the
+"fourpenny doss"; and withal, a delightful uncertainty about the
+possibilities of dinner and breakfast. Selling penny toys in the
+street in the winter months must be chilly work; and even in the hot
+days of August, when the pavements blister in the sun, and American
+and German tourists throng the streets with their Baedekers, it must
+have its drawbacks. As to the "fourpenny doss," its discomforts are
+probably mainly owing to its inmates. The common lodging-houses are
+often comparatively clean, with a big, central, well-warmed kitchen,
+presided over by a "deputy." But, of course, where many individuals
+are herded together in big dormitories, pickpockets will abound;
+pickpockets, too, abandoned enough to thieve even from other human
+wastrels. The shelter of the "casual ward" is ever held to be the last
+resource. A charwoman whom I once knew, a witty and charming
+lady,--talented, too, in her _metier_, but alas! I fear, of the "Jane
+Cakebread" type,--often complained to me of the horrors she had
+endured there. "It's downright crool," she would say with tears in her
+eyes, "the way them nurses treats yer. Fust, you 'as to be washed; an'
+washed you must be; there's no gittin' away from it. An' your' ed,
+too! It's 'Dip your 'ed in,' and dip it you must, will or no. An' with
+so much dippin' my 'earin's fair gorn." As for the compulsory oakum
+picking, the lady minded it not at all. "I didn't never tike much
+count on it," she said; "but there, my 'ands is 'ardened like."
+
+One word of warning to the wise. Do not, in the mistaken kindness of
+your heart, take (as Mrs. Carlyle did to her subsequent repentance) to
+your own home, children that appear to be "lost"; or at least only do
+so under very exceptional circumstances. When children tell you that
+they are lost, they are usually only frightened. "Bless your 'art," a
+kindly policeman once said to me, "they'll find their way 'ome safe
+enough, if you only leave 'em where they are." Even if really lost,
+the best place for the stray child is, after all, the police station,
+"and" (to quote a Mrs. Gamp-like member of the force), "well they
+knows it, the little dears--well they knows as the orficer is always
+their best friend." If you do take the child home, it will prove--as
+it did to Mrs. Carlyle--as great a riddle as the Sphinx. Once I did
+this. I took a lost infant home, indulged it in nuts, oranges, buns,
+and picture books; yet still the wretched child howled, refusing, like
+Rachel, to be comforted; and I found out to my cost that I had better
+have left it alone. (Perhaps the too unaccustomed neatness of my room
+distressed it, or the absence of the friendly and familiar "washing.")
+But once again was I strongly tempted to play the good Samaritan.
+Returning home on a winter's day, I met, in a "mean street," two
+children--boy and girl, of seven and eight years--crying bitterly. I
+interrogated them as to the cause of their tears:
+
+"Our school's burnt down," the boy said betwixt his sobs, "and we
+can't get in there to-day."
+
+A compulsory holiday seemed a feeble reason for howls. "Why don't you
+go home and say so?" I inquired.
+
+"'Cause--mother--she w--w--won't believe us," the youth sobbed. "She
+said as she'd rive our livers out, if we ever humbugged her any more,
+an' stopped away from school--and--and--_it's really burnt down this
+time_!"
+
+Terrible Nemesis, indeed, and worthy of Miss Jane Taylor's well-known
+"moral poem,"--this unforeseen result of "giving Mamma false alarms!"
+
+Burglars in London are not uncommon; they seem to know, by mere
+predatory instinct, the houses where valuables and silver abound. It
+is best to treat them, when found, gently but firmly. But if we feel
+that we cannot all attain to the courage of the Gower Street matron
+who held the thief by the collar till the police came, then we can at
+least lock up safely and retire to rest, resolute to ignore all
+suspicious sounds within the house. Casual morning visitors give, on
+the whole, more trouble to the London householder. Old ladies, for
+instance, in black silk that has seen better days, who are kindly
+willing to sell to you, for the nominal sum of one and-six, an ancient
+recipe for furniture polish, or smart and glib young men who call as
+though they were old college friends, and who, only after some
+half-hour's discussion of the state of Europe or the weather, divulge
+to you the fact that they came as agents for a tea firm. Then there
+are the itinerant vendors of tortoises, with barrow-loads of the poor
+distressed creatures. "Wonnerful things for beadles, 'm! eat a beadle
+as soon as look at 'im"--a thing they seldom, if ever, do. And, on one
+memorable occasion, a whole hour of my precious morning was taken up
+by an elderly female who represented herself, I know not on what
+grounds, as "a relative and scion of the late Sir Humphry Davy"! (I am
+glad, on the scion's behalf, to be able to add that she did not also
+appropriate the tea-spoons!)
+
+Yet another factor in city life calls for remark. This is the newsboy
+of London, a personality into which the street arab not infrequently
+develops. He is a curious being, gifted with nine lives; I should
+describe him as "a survival of the fittest." His raucous,
+indescribably husky voice may be heard at every street corner, crying
+either "Win-_ner_," or "Extra Spee-shul." Of late, the newsboys have,
+however, battened on war. "Death o' Kroojer," one of them was bawling
+one day, before the ex-President's oblivion. "Why are you shouting
+what's not true?" I inquired kindly of the youthful delinquent,
+"you've got plenty of lighting." "Shut up, you," the urchin retorted,
+no whit abashed, "battles is played out!" I once asked a newsboy,
+just as a matter of curiosity, what piece of news he had found paid
+him best. "Wy, resignation o' Mr. Gladstone," was the prompt reply, "I
+got meself a new pair o' boots outer that." The familiar and oft
+reiterated cry, "'Orrible Murder!" has, especially since "Jack the
+Ripper" days, been sacred to the calm of Sunday evenings, when men of
+the roughest class take the place of boys, and generally cry bogus
+news. It is a curious fact, which says much for the weakness of human
+nature, that the householder can rarely resist the temptation of
+buying a Sunday evening paper, even though he knows well, from bitter
+experience, that the news cried is almost invariably false.
+
+The curious indifference to other people's affairs that, as already
+mentioned, characterises the Londoner,--shows itself also in a certain
+want of public spirit. There is, naturally, very little of the proud,
+local, personal feeling that the villager and the small townsman so
+often feels. The Londoner, on the contrary, is usually self-centred,
+unsociable, phlegmatic, narrow. This pleasing quality foreigners
+politely excuse in him by calling it "the spleen," and account it,
+indeed, a kind of result of the London fog on character. The fog, or
+"London particular," as that incorrigible cockney, Sam Weller, called
+it, is thus described by a trenchant French satirist, Max O'Rell:
+
+     "The London fog, of universal reputation, is of two kinds.
+     The most curious, and at the same time the less dangerous,
+     is the black species. It is simply darkness complete and
+     intense at mid-day. The gas is immediately lighted
+     everywhere, and when this kind of fog remains in the upper
+     atmospheric regions, it does not greatly affect you. It does
+     not touch the earth, and the gas being lighted, it gives you
+     the impression of being in the street at ten o'clock at
+     night. Traffic is not stopped; the bustle of the city goes
+     on as usual. The most terrible of all is the yellow fog,
+     that the English call pea-soup. This one gets down your
+     throat and seems to choke you. You have to cover your mouth
+     with a respirator, if you do not wish to be choked or seized
+     with an attack of blood-spitting. The gas is useless, you
+     cannot see it even when you are close to the lamp. Traffic
+     is stopped. Sometimes for several hours the town seems dead
+     and buried.... When the sun makes his appearance he is
+     photographed, that folks may not forget what he is like."
+
+Another Frenchman, M. Gabriel Mourey, describes the fog more
+picturesquely:
+
+     "The frenzied, unbridled activity of the City" (he says)
+     "loses half its brutality under the mantle of fog.
+     Everything seems to be checked, to slacken into a
+     phantom-like motion that has all the vagueness of
+     hallucination. The sounds of the street are muffled; the
+     tops of the houses are lost, hardly even guessed; the lower
+     and first floors are, apparently, all that exist: behind the
+     shop-fronts, a light vapour floats, giving to the goods
+     exposed for sale something of age and disuse. Everything
+     shares, in a fashion, in the solidity and heaviness of the
+     atmosphere. The openings of the streets swallow up, like
+     tunnels, a crowd of foot-passengers and carriages, which
+     seem, thus, to disappear for ever. The trains that cross
+     Ludgate Hill wander off into emptiness on a cloud. St.
+     Paul's resembles some monumental mass of primitive times, at
+     the foot of which the human ant-heap swarms, ridiculous in
+     size, of a mean and pitiable activity. Nevertheless, they
+     are innumerable, a compact army, these miserable little
+     human creatures; the struggle for life animates them; they
+     are all of one uniform blackness in the fog; they go to
+     their daily task, they all use the same gestures, and every
+     step that they take brings them nearer to death. How many
+     millions of men for centuries have followed the same road?
+     and how many millions will follow it in the future, when
+     these of to-day shall have finished their course? But the
+     clouds settle down; they rain themselves on to the ground in
+     black masses; the sky descends among men, and covers them as
+     with an immense funereal pall."
+
+Londoners are always very quick to "catch on" with the latest "craze";
+they tire of it, however, also with proportionate rapidity. Thus, the
+hero of May is often forgotten by November, even if he have not
+already become a villain by that time. Therefore, with Londoners, it
+is best to take the ball on the hop, and gather roses, so to speak,
+while you may. A catch-word is in every one's mouth one winter; it is
+quite forgotten by next summer. Even a wildly popular new novel has
+only a "quick sale" of a few short weeks; and may then be altogether
+ousted in favour of a newer aspirant. The great city is notoriously
+fickle and wayward in her favours.
+
+Mr. Charles Booth, and his fellow-workers, have, with infinite labour
+and trouble, sifted and sorted the population of London into varying
+classes of wealth and poverty, of toil, crime, and leisure. The
+results of this work, which have reduced the heterogeneous elements of
+London population to order as with a fairy's wand, are very
+interesting as well as instructive. The results are hardly encouraging
+to would-be immigrants from the country; and it is, perhaps, fortunate
+that there are still some rustics who hold the great metropolis in
+horror, and would not on any account venture near it. This I can
+endorse from personal experience. For, only last year, I happened to
+express to a well-educated, intelligent, small farmer of some forty
+years of age, my surprise that he had never yet thought well to make
+the short three hours' journey from his native town to London. He
+seemed, however, quite contented with his ignorance. "No," he
+remarked, in answer to my wondering question, "I ain't never bin
+there, nor yet 'as the missus; and, from all I 'ear, we're best away
+from sich places."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _The Men in Blue._]
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE STONES OF LONDON
+
+  "Let others chaunt a country praise,
+   Fair river walks and meadow ways;
+   Dearer to me my sounding days
+           In London town:
+   To me the tumult of the street
+   Is no less music, than the sweet
+   Surge of the wind among the wheat,
+           By dale or down."--_Lionel Johnson._
+
+  "I pray you, let us satisfy our eyes
+   With the memorials, and the things of fame,
+   That do renown this city."--_Shakespeare._
+
+
+What book has ever been written, nay, has ever attempted to be
+written, about the general architecture of London? The largest city in
+the world,--the metropolis of many cities in one city,--the aggregate
+of a hundred towns, each as big as Oxford, as Cambridge, as
+Winchester,--why should its stones be thus neglected? And, except for
+a sprinkling of traditional gibes, an annual dole of scornful
+references, what attention does the architecture of London receive
+from its inhabitants? or, indeed, from outsiders? Every one, on the
+contrary, considers himself at liberty to fling a stone at it. Such
+titles as "Ugly London," "The Uglification of London," are "stock"
+leaders for paragraphs in daily papers. It is a well-known fact that
+nothing new can be raised in the city without drawing upon itself the
+scathing remarks and innuendoes of a too-critical, and generally
+ignorant, public. Londoners are proverbially ungrateful; they also
+think it fine, and superior, to cavil at their works of art. Mr.
+Gilbert designs a Florentine fountain in Piccadilly Circus; the very
+'bus-conductors fling their handful of mud at it as they pass; the new
+Gothic Law Courts arise in the Strand, to be freely criticised, and
+vituperated not only by every budding architect, but also by every
+"man in the street"; the City Powers erect a Temple Bar Memorial
+Griffin, and nothing less than their heads, it is felt, should with
+propriety go to adorn the monument of their crass Philistinism. A
+scheme is proposed for an addition to the cloisters of Westminster,
+and a public-spirited citizen offers to carry it out at his own
+expense: he is promptly fallen foul of, as a desecrator of the shade
+of Edward the Confessor, by the united force of the press. It is hard,
+indeed, in these critical days to be a philanthropist!
+
+And not only are we thus critical to works of our own day, but also to
+those of the past. Old London, no less than New London, is gibed at
+and mocked. "A province in brick," "a squalid village," "a large wen";
+such are only a few among the epithets that have from time to time
+been hurled at it by men and women of letters. And yet, looking at the
+matter calmly and without prejudice,--are London stones, indeed, so
+unworthy, so poor, so inglorious?
+
+In respect of its architecture, as in nearly every other respect,
+London suffers, primarily, from its vast size. "One cannot see the
+forest for the trees." What chance has Italian cupola, Doric portico,
+Gothic gable, so crowded and overpowered in the busy mart of men and
+of things? And how many people, in the whirl and rush of London, even
+_look_ at the surrounding buildings at all? Ask the ordinary person
+what the dominating architecture of London is; he or she will very
+probably be unable to make a suggestion on the matter, for the simple
+reason that the question never occurred to them in all their lives
+before. And, indeed, it is in any case a difficult question to answer.
+In this vast conglomeration of houses, houses built mainly for utility
+and not for beauty, it is difficult to see at first anything but
+heterogeneous chaos; all seems "a mighty maze, without a plan"; and
+the really noteworthy buildings are apt to be missed. The few Norman
+or Saxon antiquities may well be passed over, and even a "gem of
+purest ray serene" such as Staple Inn, may be overlooked in the
+general bustle of busy Holborn. To the large body of shoppers from the
+country and suburbs, "London" is represented satisfactorily, and
+finally, by the gay thoroughfares of Regent Street and Oxford Street;
+"the part where the shops are." And the white gleaming river, crossed
+by its many bridges, encircling the black causeways,--the long line of
+the Embankment, the Westminster towers at one end of it, the dome of
+St. Paul's on the other,--are, possibly, all that remains of London in
+the mind of the average Londoner; his view of it more or less
+resembling Byron's:
+
+  "A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,
+     Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye
+   Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
+     In sight, then lost among the forestry
+   Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
+     On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;
+   A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown
+   On a fool's head--and there is London Town!"
+
+Why should we, the travellers of the world, who so admire other
+cities, so persistently pour obloquy on our own? It is true that
+London, on a day of east wind, when the sky is leaden, when suffering
+is writ large on the faces of poor humanity, and when dirty tracts of
+paper, notwithstanding the Borough Councils, blow about in all
+directions, is hardly inspiring; and on a wet day, or a day of fog,
+when pedestrians peer vainly through that "light which London takes
+the day to be," and suffering 'bus and dray horses slide and stagger,
+in the peculiar glutinous composition termed "London mud," through the
+murky thoroughfares, it can scarcely be said to be at its best. But
+then, neither are Paris nor Berlin prepossessing under like
+circumstances.... Paradise itself would be at a discount!
+
+But, on fine days of spring or summer, days when the May sun, with
+"heavenly alchemy," transforms the dust in the atmosphere to
+gold,--when the slight haze of a London summer but adds to pictorial
+charm,--does not the great city seem a very Eldorado? Days such as
+these surely inspired Mr. Henley's _London Voluntaries_; soot, fog,
+grime are all forgotten; the city sparkles like a many-faceted
+diamond, and
+
+  "Trafalgar Square
+     (The fountains volleying golden glaze)
+   Shines like an angel-market. High aloft
+   Over his couchant lions in a haze
+   Shimmering and bland and soft,
+   A dust of chrysoprase,
+   Our Sailor takes the golden gaze
+   Of the saluting sun...."
+
+Yet it is, on the whole, not so much ourselves, as foreigners and
+colonials, who are and have been the harshest critics of London
+stones. The colonists of Melbourne, accustomed to their own straight,
+wide streets, are shocked at our narrow, tortuous, and inconvenient
+city thoroughfares; the denizens of New York, fresh from their own
+system of regular "blocks," their town of parallelograms, are amazed
+at London's want of "plan." The French, recalling their tall, white
+palaces of the Place du Louvre and the Rue de Rivoli, are surprised
+no less at our prevailing soot and grime, than by the lack of
+continuity in our streets, of conformity in our public buildings. So
+depressed, indeed, was M. Daudet in our metropolis that he went so far
+as to call Englishwomen "ugly"; the kindly and accomplished author
+must really have suffered from "the spleen." So, also, must M. Taine,
+when he unkindly likened Nelson, on the top of his column, to "a rat
+impaled on the top of a pole," and added, further, that a swamp like
+London was "a place of exile for the arts of antiquity." Not one of
+these critics, be it observed, recognises either the "aesthetic value"
+of soot, or the charm of irregularity. And see how, even when we do
+try after conformity and classical regularity, they fall foul of us!
+For instance, M. Gabriel Mourey, in his charming book on England,
+_Passe le Detroit_, while admiring the beauty of Regent's Park, makes
+somewhat scornful reference to those too-ambitious stucco terraces,
+designed by Nash in the Prince Regent's time:
+
+     "The turf of Regent's Park" (he says) "under that misty sun
+     of the London summer, that gives both a vagueness to the
+     horizon and an indefinite enlargement to the immense city
+     ... the turf of Regent's Park, with its depths of real
+     country, notwithstanding the 'new Greek' lines of the big
+     houses appearing in the distance--Greek lines that harmonise
+     so badly with that northern sun."
+
+Equally severe is M. Taine, the accomplished and broad-minded critic.
+Hear his condemnation of one of our finest palaces:
+
+     "A frightful thing is the huge palace in the Strand, which
+     is called Somerset House. Massive and heavy piece of
+     architecture, of which the hollows are inked, the porticoes
+     blackened with soot, where, in the cavity of the empty
+     court, is a sham fountain without water, pools of water on
+     the pavement, long rows of closed windows--what can they
+     possibly do in these catacombs? It seems as if the livid and
+     sooty fog had even befouled the verdure of the parks. But
+     what most offends the eyes are the colonnades, peristyles,
+     Grecian ornaments, mouldings, and wreaths of the houses, all
+     bathed in soot; poor antique architecture--what is it doing
+     in such a climate?"
+
+We give up the whole defence of the Regent's Park houses; yet, surely,
+poor Somerset House was hardly deserving of all this satire! Somerset
+House, though its river frontage is inadequate and lacking in dignity,
+yet testifies to the ability of its eighteenth-century architect, Sir
+William Chambers. The older palace of Protector Somerset, that English
+prison where two poor foreign queens, Henrietta Maria and Catherine of
+Braganza, languished in desolate grandeur, has given place to an
+imposing structure, a community of Inland Revenue, a Circumlocution
+Office on a vast scale. Situated at the Strand end of Waterloo Bridge,
+its condemned river facade looms, nevertheless, attractively in
+gleaming whiteness, across the water--a whiteness to which the
+encroaching soot that the French writers complain of only lends
+picturesque setting.
+
+M. Taine, however, had evidently no eye for sooty effects. To him,
+that mystic view from the river bridges, that view that inspired his
+best sonnet in Wordsworth, a "nocturne" in Mr. Whistler, and immortal
+art in the boy Turner, has to him merely "the look of a bad drawing in
+charcoal which some one has rubbed with his sleeve."
+
+While London's natural and primitive instinct is perhaps toward
+Gothic architecture ("the only style," says M. Taine of Westminster
+Abbey, "that is at all adapted to her climate,") yet, no doubt, the
+prevailing note of her architecture is its cosmopolitanism. It is
+her misfortune, as well as her glory, to show every kind of feverish
+architectural craze and style in close juxtaposition--Gothic,
+Renaissance, Norman, Greek, and Early English. Ardent spirits have,
+at various times, sought to erect in her streets the oriflammes of
+other nations, quite regardless of suitability or appropriate
+setting. Italian spires and cupolas that would adorn their native
+valleys, and shine, gleaming pinnacles of white,--landmarks to the
+wandering peasant over the intervening black forest of pines,--are
+here crowded, perhaps, between a fashionable "emporium" and a modern
+hotel; Doric temples, such as should stand aloof in lonely grandeur
+each on its tall Acropolis, here are sandwiched, maybe, between a
+model dairy-shop and a fashionable library; Renaissance palaces
+that, by the waters of Venice, would reflect their arches and
+pillars in a sunny, golden glow, here confront blackened statues of
+square-toed nineteenth-century philanthropists,--or, more prosaic
+still, a smoke-breathing London terminus!
+
+Yet, while we concede the Gothic style to be more in keeping with
+London skies and spirits, it is, nevertheless, difficult to say which
+of her styles is most dominant--for all, truly, have been dominant in
+their day. For London, in this respect, has been the victim of
+succeeding fashions; over her resistless and long-suffering mass have,
+in every new age and decade,
+
+  "Bards made new poems,
+   Thinkers new schools,
+   Statesmen new systems,
+   Critics new rules."
+
+Nearly every decade of the past two centuries can be traced by the
+scholar in London streets and monuments. Nay, from the time of the
+Great Fire, when Wren, that master spirit in architecture, rose in his
+strength, and undertook to rebuild sixty destroyed churches,--the
+progress, or falling off, of London in this art can be generally
+traced in the metropolis. Wren, best known to posterity as the builder
+of St. Paul's, was a remarkable figure of his robust time. Like the
+magician of some old fairy tale, he caused a new and more beautiful
+London to rise again from its ashes. Macaulay wrote of him:
+
+     "In architecture, an art which is half a science ... our
+     country could boast at the time of the Revolution of one
+     truly great man, Sir Christopher Wren; and the fire which
+     laid London in ruins, destroying 13,000 houses and 89
+     churches, gave him an opportunity unprecedented in history
+     of displaying his powers. The austere beauty of the Athenian
+     portico, the glowing sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was,
+     like most of his contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and
+     perhaps incapable of appreciating; but no man born on our
+     side of the Alps has imitated with so much success the
+     magnificence of the palace churches of Italy."
+
+Wren's master-work, it may be said, is after all only imitative; St.
+Paul's in London is but an adaptation of St. Peter's in Rome. But it
+is a free adaptation, and in the grand style. Nor will any one be
+disposed to deny the great architect's wealth of imagination,
+originality and resource, who studies Wren's sixty City churches, none
+of which, either in spire or church itself, is a duplicate of another.
+Perhaps, among them all, it is the spire of St. Mary-le-Bow that, for
+grace and beauty of design, bears away the palm.
+
+For forty years no important building was erected in London in which
+Wren was not concerned. That his wider plan for the regulating and
+straightening of the streets themselves was not adopted we have,
+perhaps, reason to be thankful. While nearly all the city spires
+recall Wren's master-hand and versatile tastes, the Banqueting House,
+that well-known palatial fragment in Whitehall, is the principal
+monument left to us by Inigo Jones, Wren's immediate predecessor.
+Inigo Jones is principally famous as the designer of that splendid
+palace of Whitehall that was never built, that "dream-palace" of
+Palladian splendour that was intended to replace the ancient "York
+House" of Wolsey, the former "Whitehall" of the Tudors. The
+river-front of this imagined palace, as designed by Inigo, would, in
+its noble simplicity, have been a thing of beauty for all time; it is
+to be regretted that the plan was never carried out. The civil
+troubles of the impending Revolution, the want of money for so
+grandiose a scheme, prevented the undertaking. The sole realisation of
+the dream is now the old Banqueting House that we pass in Whitehall, a
+building isolated among its neighbours, intended only as the central
+portion of but one wing of the enormous edifice. Cruel, indeed, is the
+irony of history, and little did James I., for whose glory this
+magnificent palace was planned, think "that he was raising a pile from
+which his son was to step from the throne to a scaffold." For this
+very Banqueting House served later as Charles's vestibule on his way
+to execution. With the final banishment of the Stuarts, Whitehall was
+deserted as a Royal residence; and the old palace, destroyed by
+successive fires, its picturesque "Gothic" and "Holbein" gateways
+removed as obstructions, has in its turn made way for imposing
+Government Offices. Yet the Banqueting House, sole and sad relic of a
+vanished past, still stands solidly in its place, and is now used as a
+Museum.
+
+What, one imagines, would modern London have been had Inigo Jones's
+plan found fruition, and the whole of Whitehall, from Westminster to
+the Banqueting House, been given up to his palatial splendours? That
+the present Buckingham Palace is but a poor substitute for such
+imagined magnificence is certain, and the loss of Inigo's fine
+Palladian river-frontage is perhaps hardly atoned for by the terrace
+of our modern Houses of Parliament; yet these, too, are beautiful, and
+Whitehall has not lost its palatial air; for its wide and still
+widening streets, its spacious and imposing Government Offices, still
+serve to keep up the illusion, and, at any rate, the state of royalty.
+Already one of the handsomest streets in London, its buildings are
+being yet further improved, and a new War Office of vast proportions
+is rising slowly on the long-vacant plot of ground where, it was said,
+three hundred different kinds of wild flowers lately grew, whose
+yellow and pink blossoms used to wave temptingly before the eyes of
+travellers on omnibus-tops.... Now, never more will flowers grow
+there; no longer will the picturesque, green gabled roofs of
+"Whitehall Court" look across to the fleckered sunlight of the
+Admiralty and the Horse Guards. Instead, palatial buildings, something
+after the Palladian manner of Inigo Jones's imagined Whitehall Palace,
+will form a noble street, in a more or less continuous line of massive
+splendour; a road of palaces, to be further dignified by the erection
+of new and spacious Government Offices, near the Abbey, on the line of
+the destroyed and obstructive King Street. When all the Whitehall
+improvements are carried out, the dignity and beauty of London will
+gain immensely, and the view down the long street of palaces,--the
+Abbey, unobstructed by intervening buildings, shining like a star at
+its Parliament Street end,--will be among the very finest sights in
+the metropolis.
+
+[Illustration: _The Horse Guards._]
+
+If Inigo Jones, steeped in Italian art, was severely Palladian in
+style, Wren, his successor, "a giant in architecture," was a
+versatile and original genius. The quantity and the quality of his
+work may well overpower a later age. "He paved the way," says
+Fergusson, "and smoothed the path"; none of his successors have
+surpassed if, indeed, equalled him. During the eighteenth century, the
+Renaissance still held sway in architecture; James Gibbs, in 1721,
+built the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, of which the Grecian
+portico, says Mr. Hare, "is the only perfect example in London"; the
+brothers Adam, of "Adelphi" fame, flourished, giving, with their
+doorways, their fireplaces, their curves and arches, a new impulse to
+the domestic architecture of their day; Sir William Chambers erected
+Somerset House; and Sir John Soane, who in 1788 designed the present
+Bank of England, was, with others of his contemporaries, a pioneer of
+the coming classical revival. With the beginning of the nineteenth
+century the change came, and architectural design in England
+completely changed. Now the "new Greek lines" that, say the French,
+"go so ill with our northern climate," became all the rage; the mild
+Gothic of Wren, itself a "last dying echo," completely disappeared,
+and Greek temples, "orders," pediments, columns, grew everywhere like
+mushrooms. Nash, the architect of the Regency, the "Apostle of
+Plaster," planned out Regent Street, a new road to extend from the
+Prince's colonnaded mansion Carlton House, to the new Park named after
+him: hence arose the Quadrant, and the Regent's Park terraces already
+alluded to. All was Greek, everything was colonnaded, at that day:
+
+     "Once the fashion was introduced it became a mania. Thirty
+     or forty years ago no building was complete without a Doric
+     portico, hexastyle, or octastyle, prostylar, or distyle in
+     antis; and no educated man dared to confess ignorance of a
+     great many very hard words which then became fashionable.
+     Churches were most afflicted in this way: next to these came
+     gaols and county halls, but even railway stations and
+     panoramas found their best advertisements in these sacred
+     adjuncts; and terraces and shop-fronts thought they had
+     attained the acme of elegance when either a wooden or
+     plaster caricature of a Grecian order suggested the
+     classical taste of the builder."
+
+Nash was the chief introducer of "stucco" (the covering of brick with
+cement to imitate stone), which has since become so vulgarised
+everywhere, and especially in the fashionable West End squares and
+streets. Nash's tastes in this respect gave rise to the following
+epigram:
+
+  "Augustus at Rome was for building renowned,
+   And of marble he left what of brick he had found;
+   But is not our Nash, too, a very great master?
+   He finds us all brick, and he leaves us all plaster."
+
+All the great public buildings of the time shared in the classic
+revival. The British Museum, built by the Smirkes in the first half of
+the last century, at enormous expense, is the most successful
+imitation of Ionic architecture in England. The style of the pediment
+is after that of the Athenian Acropolis. Though critics object to it
+that it has no suitable base, it is, nevertheless, an imposing
+structure. The Greek portico of the London University Buildings, in
+Gower Street, erected by Wilkins in 1827, is, says Fergusson, "the
+most pleasing specimen of its class ever erected in this country." But
+it is so secluded and recessed from the street, as to be hardly seen.
+Its architect, Wilkins, had the misfortune to be chosen to erect our
+much-abused National Gallery building, with its condemned
+"pepper-boxes" of cupolas; the designer, however, was so hampered by
+conditions and restrictions, as to be almost helpless in the matter.
+The National Gallery, nevertheless, still stands on the finest site in
+London, an object of scorn to visitors and foreigners.
+
+But the ultra-classic craze, in London, burnt itself out at last in
+one final flare. Of the innumerable buildings that still tell of the
+extent of the mania, perhaps the most exaggerated is the church of New
+St. Pancras, built after not one but several Athenian temples. It is a
+strange medley of forms, a real nightmare of Greek art. Its tower is a
+double reproduction of the "Temple of the Winds," one temple on the
+top of the other: while its interior and its caryatids are modelled
+on the Erechtheion. Poor caryatids, designed for the bright sunlight
+of the Acropolis, and imprisoned, blackened and ogre-like, in the
+dreary and muddy Euston Road! "Calm" you may be, in your
+pre-surroundings, but hardly "far-looking"; for your view is
+restricted (even if fog does not restrict it yet further) to the
+uninspiring buildings of Euston Station opposite! Truly, they who
+placed you here must have been somewhat lacking in sense of humour!
+The double Tower of the Winds is not so unhappy as the poor caryatids;
+it even looks well, in its height and its silvery greyness, seen over
+the Tavistock Square trees, which hide its inadequate portico. The
+failure of this incongruous church, added to its vast expense, brought
+the final reaction from the classical fever; yet, from one extreme,
+men directly rushed to the other.
+
+The Gothic revival, as might be expected, set in severely; the classic
+sculptors changed their style and became Gothic; new Gothic sculptors,
+Pugin, Britton, and others, arose on the artistic firmament. Then, in
+1840-59, Sir Charles Barry built the chief modern architectural
+feature of London, the New Palace of Westminster, in the mediaeval and
+Tudor style. The small chapel of Henry VII. gave the idea for this
+vast edifice. The enormous structure, so often criticised, is yet, to
+judge by the many photographs and views annually sold of it, the most
+popular building in London.
+
+Even M. Taine, who consistently falls foul of all London architecture
+that is not Gothic, speaks thus of it:
+
+     "The architecture ... has the merit of being neither Grecian
+     nor Southern; it is Gothic, accommodated to the climate, to
+     the requirements of the eye. The palace magnificently
+     mirrors itself in the shining river; in the distance, its
+     clock-tower, its legions of turrets and of carvings are
+     vaguely outlined in the mist. Leaping and twisted lines,
+     complicated mouldings, trefoils and rose windows diversify
+     the enormous mass which covers four acres, and produces on
+     the mind the idea of a tangled forest."
+
+The great Exhibition of 1851 gave, naturally, much impetus to the
+enlargement, as well as the architecture, of London. And though the
+English school of architects became somewhat more catholic in taste,
+yet the Gothic style still held the public favour. Butterfield's
+severe church of All Saints, Margaret Street, delighted the public
+taste, and initiated the fashion for "Butterfield" spires; Scott's
+church of St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington, was also popular. Would not
+either of these be noticed, if "planted out" in an Italian valley? And
+Street's well-known New Law Courts, in the Strand, built 1879-83, are
+the latest expression of modern Gothic. Opinion is divided on the
+subject of their merits, but undoubtedly they form, viewed from the
+Strand, a fine pile of buildings.
+
+What is called the "Queen Anne" building craze has set in strongly of
+late years, its chief pioneers being the two architects,--Norman Shaw,
+who built the picturesque mansion of Lowther Lodge, solidly fine in
+its darkened red-brick, close to the Albert Hall,--and Bodley, who
+designed the fine offices of the London School Board on the Thames
+Embankment. Lowther Lodge is said to "exhibit very well the merits of
+the best order of "Queen Anne" design of the domestic class"; its
+successors are much more efflorescent. Everywhere now spring up
+so-called "Queen Anne" mansions, streets, houses, public offices; and
+red-brick, terra-cotta, nooks, ingles, casement windows are
+multiplying _ad libitum_ all over the metropolis. Different styles
+prevail at different times, and the "Queen Anne" wave just now
+threatens to overwhelm us. Flats, stores, police-stations, hotels, all
+are becoming "Queen Anne." Even if walls are still thin, even if the
+jerry-builder is still to the fore, new streets are, none the less,
+built in the "Queen Anne" manner; and the last stage of every craze is
+worse than the first.
+
+What, then, is the prevailing architecture of London? We have perused
+its history; we have wandered through its streets, and have gazed on
+all and every style of building. Decision ought to be easy. Yet it is
+not so easy as it looks. In the Forum at Rome, you have to dig to find
+out all the different strata of buildings--republican, monarchical,
+imperial. In London, it is even more puzzling, for here you see them
+all together, above ground, in close juxtaposition--Tudor, Stuart,
+Hanoverian--it needs more than a magician's wand to relegate each to
+its proper period in history. Wren's St. Paul's, the enormous Hotel
+Cecil, the Whitehall Government Offices, the old timbered mansions in
+Bishopsgate Street, Pennethorne's new Tudor Record office, the Railway
+Architecture of Charing Cross and of Liverpool Street, the Aquarium
+hung gaily with posters, the Savoy Hotel in white and gold--you have
+them all, side by side. You pass through the prevailing stucco and
+heavy porticoes of Belgrave Square,--the new red-brick and terra-cotta
+of the Cadogan and Grosvenor Estates,--the stone dignity of Broad
+Sanctuary,--the dull brick uniformity of Bloomsbury;--which style,
+think you, suits your ideal London best?
+
+But, while it may reasonably be matter for conjecture as to what
+architectural style really suits London best,--or if, indeed, a
+wholesome mixture of all styles be not a desideratum,--it seems,
+perhaps, safe to say that it is the "dark house," in the "long,
+unlovely street" of Tennyson's condemnation, of Madame de Stael's
+vituperation,--that, in its dull uniformity, really occupies most of
+the area of London. There are, of course, minor differences. In West
+London, the "unlovely street" may flower into questionable stucco; in
+East London, it may become lower, dingier, and meaner: but in original
+intent all are the same. So monotonous, indeed, are they, that, in
+secluded squares or corners, one welcomes joyfully an original
+door-knocker, even such a door-canopy as that described in _Little
+Dorrit_, "a projecting canopy in carved work, of festooned
+jack-towels, and children's heads with water-on-the-brain, designed
+after a once-popular monumental pattern." In interiors, these same
+monotonous houses may all differ widely, though even here no universal
+rule of taste can be laid down; and the little School Board boy who
+said, naively, "Rich people's houses ain't nice inside; there is
+books all round, and no washin'" unconsciously testified to the wide
+differences entailed by "the point of view." In Mayfair, Westminster,
+or Belgravia,--yes, even in Bloomsbury, one dull brick or stucco
+house-front may present the same external gloom as another, and yet,
+internally, may differ much from that other in glory. And this fact is
+typical of poor as well as of rich London. An Englishman's house is
+his castle, and Englishmen's tastes, as we know, are seldom much in
+evidence. "Adam" ceilings, "Morris" tapestries, Pompeian courts, leafy
+vistas, mediaeval halls, "Queen Anne", "ingleneuks," all these may
+surprise the visitor, when once the "Open sesame" has revealed to him
+all that lies behind that magic front door that guards the Briton's
+household gods from the vulgar glare of the street.
+
+Even some of the treasure-houses of England's magnates,
+merchant-princes, and collectors are curiously unsuggestive
+externally. In this connection I may quote Mr. Moncure Conway's
+description of the late Mr. Alfred Morrison's house in Carlton House
+Terrace, adorned by the genius of Mr. Owen Jones:
+
+     "The house" (he says) "is one of those large, square,
+     lead-coloured buildings, of which so many thousands exist in
+     London, that any one passing by would pronounce
+     characteristically characterless. It repeats the apparent
+     determination of ages that there shall be no external
+     architectural beauty in London. Height, breadth, massiveness
+     of portal, all declare that he who resides here has not
+     dispensed with architecture because he could not command it.
+     In other climes this gentleman is dwelling behind carved
+     porticoes of marble and pillars of porphyry; but here the
+     cloud and sky have commanded him to build a blank fortress
+     and find his marble and porphyry inside of it. Pass through
+     this heavy doorway, and in an instant every fair clime
+     surrounds you, every region lavishes its sentiment; you are
+     the heir of all the ages."
+
+The street that Tennyson really designed in _In Memoriam_ was Wimpole
+Street, surely not as ugly or as pretentious a street as many others
+of the West End. Gower Street, too, was called unkindly by Mr. Ruskin
+"the _nec plus ultra_ of ugliness in British architecture"; yet,
+indeed, Bloomsbury houses, unfashionable as they are, seem by their
+very plainness and want of adornment to maintain a certain dignity
+that is unknown to those long rows of stucco catafalques of Kensington
+and Belgravia, where, standing beneath the endless vista of projecting
+porches, one's mind naturally turns to tombs and whited sepulchres.
+
+The Bloomsbury houses are, at any rate, simple and inoffensive. Mr.
+Moncure Conway, in a further passage, pleads the cause of London's
+ugly residential streets:
+
+     "Much is said from time to time about the ugliness of London
+     street architecture ... the miles and miles of yellow-gray
+     and sooty brick houses, each as much like the other as if so
+     many miles of hollow block were chopped at regular
+     intervals. And yet there is something so pleasant to think
+     of in these interminable rows of brick blocks, that they are
+     not altogether unpleasant to the eye. For they are houses of
+     good size, comfortable houses; and their sameness, only
+     noticeable through their vast number, means that the average
+     of well-to-do-people in London is also vast. It implies a
+     distribution of wealth, an equality of conditions, which
+     make the best feature of a solid civilisation. There is much
+     beauty inside these orange-tawny walls. Before any house in
+     that league of sooty brick you may pause and say with fair
+     security: In that house are industrious, educated people ...
+     they have made there, within their mass of burnt clay, a
+     true cosmos, where love and thought dwell with them: and
+     between all that and a fine outside they have chosen the
+     better part."
+
+But, according to Edward Gibbon, the historian, the excuse for
+London's ugly "exteriors" is not so much because the inhabitants have
+"chosen the better part," as because the average Englishman mostly
+keeps his show and his magnificence for his country seat. Comparing
+London and Paris, Gibbon said (in 1763):
+
+     "I devoted many hours of the morning to the circuit of Paris
+     and the neighbourhood, to the visit of churches and palaces
+     conspicuous by their architecture.... An Englishman may hear
+     without reluctance that in these.... Paris is superior to
+     London, since the opulence of the French capital arises from
+     the defects of its government and religion. In the absence
+     of Louis XIV. and his successors the Louvre has been left
+     unfinished; but the millions which have been lavished on the
+     sands of Versailles and the morass of Marli could not be
+     supplied by the legal allowance of a British king. The
+     splendour of the French nobles is confined to their town
+     residence; that of the English is more usefully distributed
+     in their country seats; and we should be astonished at our
+     own riches if the labours of architecture, the spoils of
+     Italy and Greece, which are now scattered from Inverary to
+     Wilton, were accumulated in a few streets between Marylebone
+     and Westminster."
+
+In some parts of Bloomsbury,--Great Ormond Street, for instance, or
+Queen Square,--some of the old houses are charming in their darkened
+red-brick and plain casements neatly outlined with white paint. But
+then most of these are, like old Kensington Palace, really of Queen's
+Anne's time, and the original is ever better than the imitation. No
+doubt, to the inhabitant, there are accompanying drawbacks to some of
+these; beetles of long standing may infest their grimy kitchens, and
+their ancient oak panelling may be prolific in those large rats which
+are so unpleasantly suggestive, to the nervous, of ghosts.
+
+Queen Square is the oldest of all the Bloomsbury Squares; for in 1746
+London hardly extended further than the northern end of Southampton
+Row, all beyond being more or less open country. Queen Square is so
+named in honour of Queen Anne, and her statue, as its presiding
+genius, adorns its further end, which was left open, as already
+mentioned, on account of the beautiful view it afforded of the heights
+of Highgate and Hampstead. Of the same solidity and almost mediaeval
+suggestion as Queen Square are the picturesque Charterhouse Square
+(now mainly hotels and business precincts), Trinity Square, near the
+Tower (with the same tendency), and other unsuspected haunts of old
+time. And in the charming "old Court suburb" of Kensington, several
+such squares, delightful in greenery and mellowed red-brick, are to be
+found. How refreshing, for instance, is Kensington Square, a square
+that still keeps its old-world look, and suggests Miss Thackeray's
+pleasant touches, despite the sad encroachments of modernity at one
+end, in the shape of tall and very prosaic blocks of "model
+dwellings." There is, as stand, a great modern craze for red-brick,
+and the many new and often quaintly designed houses, when darkened by
+years, will no doubt improve residential London vastly. And despite
+the enormous recent growth of London, and the incessant crowding of
+bricks and mortar, there yet remains an almost suburban charm about
+Kensington, Chelsea, and Fulham--in Kensington especially--where a few
+old-world corners are still untouched, where Kensington Palace still,
+in its Dutch solidity, "maintains all the best traditions of Queen
+Anne's time," and where the pretty modern dwelling-houses abound,
+described so sympathetically by M. Gabriel Mourey in _Passe le
+Detroit_:
+
+     "In front of the pretty little facades of the little
+     red-brick houses, the style which Philip Webb, the
+     architect, invented, and which is so happily appropriate
+     alike to the requirements of English life and to the colour
+     and movements of the atmosphere, it is pleasant to dream of
+     an existence in which all is calm, intimate, and gravely
+     happy. The windows are guillotine-like, half hidden by
+     balconies with trailing plants, and through them one catches
+     sight of neat, bright furniture, designed at once for
+     utility and decoration. A woman is seated at the window,
+     working or reading, of quiet and placid beauty. The children
+     come in from playing in some neighbouring park. They are
+     supple and vigorous, like young animals, frank and direct of
+     aspect, not spoilt by any unhealthy precocity. The husband
+     comes in from the City, his bag in hand, after his hours on
+     feverish business, the joy of the same horizon found every
+     evening, the sweetness of home; happiness composed of
+     simple, various elements, a sensation of prosperity in all
+     the little houses, all alike the same comfortable
+     contentment. And as before a camera or in reading a book one
+     likes to imagine or evoke the soul of the artist, so here
+     the personality of this Philip Webb claims me, the soul of
+     the architect who, like Solness, the master builder, has
+     passed his life in building not palaces or churches, but
+     simple houses."
+
+Such modern houses are, at any rate, a great relief from the
+monotonous and too-predominating fever of Georgian and Early Victorian
+stucco. A new city of red brick has arisen on the Cadogan Estate, and
+in the remodelled purlieus of Sloane Street big mansions of red flats
+tower skywards, and blossom into oriels, gables, dormer-windows, and
+such like excrescences. Originality is a new thing in London domestic
+architecture, and the Cadogan Estate is, on the whole, vastly
+improved. The Bedford Estate of Bloomsbury might, no doubt, be rebuilt
+to equal advantage but for two potent reasons, the one being that its
+house walls, built strongly in last century's beginning, show no signs
+of decay; the other, that the fitful tide of fashion has so deserted
+the locality as to make the expense hardly worth incurring. Therefore,
+Bloomsbury houses are merely "tinkered" up in places, and adorned here
+and there with facings and mouldings of terra-cotta; a half-hearted
+proceeding at best, and no more successful than such half-measures
+usually are.
+
+But, while the plain, nondescript brick houses of Gower Street and
+Baker Street still remain the prevailing type of London architecture,
+there is everywhere noticeable a tendency to improve and embellish the
+streets of the metropolis, to rebuild in a better or, at any rate, a
+more ambitious way. Travelling along the highway of Oxford Street,
+from ancient Tyburn to Tottenham Court Road, how many tall, new, and
+ornate house-fronts rise along the line on each side of us! There is a
+warehouse in Oxford Street by Collcutt, which, say architectural
+authorities, "has probably the most showy facade in England for the
+money." The lease of a small, mean house expires; it is promptly
+destroyed--to rise again in dazzling red-brick, terra-cotta, and wide
+casements. Everywhere else it is the same; everywhere is red-brick,
+and red or buff terra-cotta, adorning alike shop-front, warehouse,
+"Tube" station, and palatial mansion, till, indeed, you hardly know
+which is which. Very good indeed is the effect of some of this new
+street-architecture. Sometimes the new houses are even rebuilt in "old
+English" style, or on old models, with all the latest improvements;
+as, for instance, "Short's" famous wine-tavern in the Strand, lately
+re-erected as a semi-mediaeval building, with white and green
+adornments, sloping roof, and the projecting "sign" of old times.
+Could we "dip into the future far as human eye can see"; were it given
+to us, but for one moment, to behold the architectural glories and
+wonders of the London of, say, the year A.D. 2000; well, we should, at
+any rate, comprehend better whither our present efforts tend. Then
+will the public buildings of the Victorian Age, as of the Elizabethan
+Age, be pointed out proudly to the wondering sightseer; the golden
+glitter of the "Anno Victoriae" on the Royal Exchange Pediment will
+prove no less inspiring than the "Anno Elizabethae"; and while such
+ancient monuments as St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey must ever command
+the primal reverence of every Englishman worthy the name, no less will
+such landmarks as the Albert Hall, the Albert Memorial, the Natural
+History Museum, or the Imperial Institute, speak to the ages of the
+famous "sixty years of ever widening Empire." For, surely, the
+greatest power of architecture is that it leaves the memorial, in
+turn, of every age. Therefore, all the more, should
+
+  "You, the Patriot Architect,
+   You that shape for Eternity,
+   Raise a stately memorial,
+   Make it regally gorgeous, ...
+   Rich in symbol, in ornament,
+   Which may speak to the centuries,
+   All the centuries after us...."
+
+Architecture, like literature, needs time to orb it "into the perfect
+star," to give it its right place and setting in history. And yet, it
+should be of every age. "We could name," said the late Mr. Walter
+Pater, "certain modern churches in London ... to which posterity may
+well look back puzzled. Could these exquisitely pondered buildings
+have been, indeed, works of the nineteenth century? Were they not the
+subtlest creations of the age in which Gothic art was spontaneous? In
+truth, we have had instances of workmen, who, through long, large
+devoted study of the handiwork of the past, have done the thing
+better, with a more fully enlightened consciousness, with full
+intelligence of what those early workmen only guessed at."
+
+The Albert Hall, so much abused for its acoustic defects, is, from its
+impressive size at least, a well-known London landmark. "That
+monstrous caricature of the Colosseum," some one has called it; but
+critics of London's modern buildings generally err on the side of
+severity, and the vast elliptical mass is certainly imposing. In the
+Albert Hall, the new style of terra-cotta decorations, already
+referred to, is largely prominent; the Pantheon-like dome has a
+pleasing solidity, and the glow of smoke-darkened red, in spring, is
+delightfully contrasted with the green trees of the neighbouring Park.
+Enormous "mansions," also red-brick, but hardly attractive, have
+arisen, in Babel-like height, beside the Albert Hall, painfully
+dwarfing and overshadowing the charming building of "Lowther Lodge"
+adjacent. These "mansions" and "flats" have increased of late years
+enormously in London, are, indeed, still increasing. From "model
+lodging-houses" to elaborate and expensive palaces, every kind of
+income and taste is, in this respect, catered for; and these enormous
+dwelling-houses,--cities, or at least villages, in themselves,--attain
+terrific proportions of height and size. In them live "all sorts and
+conditions of men." Thus, in the "blocks" of model dwellings, ladies
+in eternal "Hinde's curlers" quarrel vociferously, with arms akimbo,
+from across their railed-in outer landing-places; while, in more
+elaborate dwellings, tubs of "yuccas" and other evergreen trees greet
+the visitor cheerfully from the glazed-in Nuremberg-like courtyards,
+and elaborate flower-boxes adorn the balconies. Indeed, the modern
+"flats" already form no inconsiderable factor in London's street
+architecture; and sometimes, as in Bedford Court Mansions, Bedford
+Square, they are of considerable artistic merit. The new hotels, also,
+are another leading feature of modern London. Fifty years ago London
+had but few hotels, and those that did exist, often left much to be
+desired in the way of comfort, cleanliness, and reliability. Now
+enormous palaces have arisen everywhere, not only in the West End, but
+in Bayswater, Bloomsbury, and other less modish quarters; sumptuous
+mansions, still of ornate red brick and terra-cotta, springing up with
+the promptitude of an Aladdin's palace, and dominating, as it may be,
+their respective street or square. It was not long since that I
+chanced to meet two queens in a cart filled with straw--unregal state
+for a queen! going along, smiling placidly, to their final resting
+place. The queens were of terra-cotta, and their last, sad journey was
+presumably only from Doulton's factories in Lambeth to their destined
+abode on the Russell Hotel facade; nevertheless, I sympathised with
+the poor things in their patient submission, led thus, in an open
+cart, to execution, roped and hung amid the jeers of the populace.
+
+In the "Venetian Gothic" style is the modern Crown Insurance Office,
+in New Bridge Street, built by Woodward. Of this edifice, D. G.
+Rossetti, who lived at one time close by it, says: "It seems to me the
+most perfect piece of civil architecture of the new school that I have
+seen in London. I never cease to look at it with delight." Of what is
+called the "Secular Gothic" order, is the large terra-cotta "Natural
+History Museum," at South Kensington, an ambitious building by
+Waterhouse, about which much difference of opinion rages. While Mr.
+Hare has no doubt at all but that it is "an embodiment of pretentious
+ugliness, a huge pile of mongrel Lombardic architecture," other
+authorities have seen in its originality "many evidences of anxious
+and skilful pains." Its general effect is, it must be confessed, at
+present somewhat bizarre and striped. The "Prudential Assurance
+Offices," also by Waterhouse, built close to the site of old
+Furnival's Inn, in Holborn, is a more generally popular edifice, sober
+and solid in its unrelieved, dark-red terra-cotta.
+
+Many other notable buildings might, of course, be mentioned, but space
+is limited. Enough, however, has been said to show that Londoners are
+still slaves to architectural fashion, and that the now prevailing
+mode is for red-brick and terra-cotta. Indeed, the London of the close
+of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth century, will
+surely be "picked out" by future antiquaries by lines and "holdings"
+of red, just as the limits of the Georgian and early-Victorian
+classical fever are now shown by white Doric and Ionic pediments and
+columns, gleaming from beneath their invading mantle of soot. Some
+people say, by the way, that the present love of terra-cotta as
+building material, partly arises from the fact that it can be
+_washed_. If this be true, then it only shows that the Londoner of
+to-day is wanting in appreciation of the before-mentioned "artistic
+value" of soot. It may be, that, like the tailless fox of the fable,
+we admire what we must perforce put up with, or what we are accustomed
+to. Yet, it has always seemed to me that London's chief beauty lies in
+this all-pervading grime, mellowing, softening, harmonizing. M. Taine,
+we know, did not hold this view; is it, indeed, to be expected from
+any one but a true, a born Londoner? St. Paul's blackened festoons of
+sculptured roses; the grimy cupids, nestling on the pedestals of the
+Russell family's statues in the Bloomsbury squares; the mournful Greek
+frieze on the Athenaeeum Club, in Pall Mall;--yes, even the sooty
+resignation of the St. Pancras caryatids; does not the pall of soot,
+which so afflicts the Southerner, seem to convey something of London's
+spirit, humanity, Ego, in fact? Who, for instance, will maintain that
+the blackness of St. Paul's itself does not immeasurably add to the
+grandeur of its effect? As G. A. Sala said:
+
+     "It is really the better for all the incense which all the
+     chimneys since the time of Wren have offered at its shrine;
+     and are still flinging up every day from their foul and
+     grimy censers."
+
+Who, also, will not own that the new Tate Gallery, erected at such
+expense by Sir Henry Tate's munificence on the old site of Millbank
+Prison, is not improving, year by year, by the combined action of
+London's river, fogs, and soot? It already looks less incongruously
+white amid its murky surrounding wharves; less like a frosted
+wedding-cake, less aggressively Greek near the grey Gothic pile of
+neighbouring Westminster. And what of that picturesque railway station
+of St. Pancras, picturesque with the combined glamour of blue London
+mist and distance, towering like some shadowy mediaeval fortress over
+the murky modernity of the Euston Road! (Even the Euston Road, saddest
+and least inspiring of thoroughfares, can, on occasion, be glorified.)
+In one of London's lurid autumn sunsets, the large red sun, obscured
+through fog and mist, sinks slowly behind the embattled towers of St.
+Pancras, lending it such an appearance of romance that even a French
+writer (not, however, M. Taine!) has called it:
+
+     "A monumental railway-station, like a cathedral with its
+     arched windows, its turrets, and enormous belfry, all of
+     red-brick, which the weather darkens so prettily."
+
+And has not the misty glory of soot and river fog appealed to Turner,
+the artist; appealed, in turn, to all the painters who have at all
+penetrated to the spirit of the beauty and the mystery of London? Even
+M. Taine, so severe otherwise upon London's sooty palaces, is
+compelled to admit, reluctantly, some charm, after all, in this "huge
+conglomeration of human creation," and to confess that "the shimmering
+of river-waves, the scattering of the light imprisoned in vapour, the
+soft whitish or pink tints which cover these vastnesses, diffuse a
+sort of grace over the prodigious city, having the effect of a smile
+upon the face of a shaggy and blackened Cyclops."
+
+The "Cyclops" is maligned and traduced by tradition, and the smile on
+his blackened face is often beautiful. We call London ugly, mostly
+from mere custom, but very few among us trouble to look and judge for
+ourselves. "I wonder," once said Archbishop Benson, "who out of the
+many thousands who daily pass St. Paul's, ever look up at it." And it
+is so with all London's great and historic buildings. Church spires
+and towers were supposed, in the simple days of old, to carry the eye
+and the mind up to Heaven; but what chance have they, poor things,
+when, even on one of London's delightful grey-blue skies of summer, no
+one heeds them, or their message? Like Bunyan's "Man with the
+Muckrake," we fix our eyes ever steadily on the ground; the only
+London stones that attract our notice being its jutting kerb-stones,
+its sounding asphalt and macadamized pavements ... we fix our
+attention on the dull, dead levels; we lose "the fair illuminated
+letters, and have no eye for the gilding." Yet we still scoff at our
+own historic city, not because we ever look at it on our own account,
+but because we have always been taught that it is the right thing to
+do so.
+
+It is a curious fact that the fine passages which everybody knows and
+quotes about the Stones of London, all refer to them in ruins.
+Macaulay placed his New Zealander on a broken arch of London Bridge,
+to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. Shelley pictured London as "an
+habitation of bitterns," and the piers of Waterloo Bridge as "the
+nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers." Rossetti overthrew the British
+Museum in order to leave the archaeologists of some future race in
+confusion as to the ruins of London and Nineveh. Ruskin, who had so
+much that is bright and beautiful to say of the Stones of Venice,
+dismissed London with a warning of prophetic doom; saw her stones
+crumbling "through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction." It is
+surely time that some new and ardent spirit--some twentieth-century
+Ruskin--with eyes no longer set upon the dear dead past, should fix
+his gaze on what is grand and significant in the Stones of London,
+while still they stand the one upon the other; and, seeing, should
+reveal to the world something of the sombre glory of its greatest
+city.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  A
+
+  "Adam" decorations, 246, 462
+
+  Addison, 80, 179, 383
+
+  Adelaide Gallery, the, 290
+
+  Advertisement, art of, in London, 320
+
+  Aggas's Map, 5, 187
+
+  Ainger, Canon, 146
+
+  Albany, the, 380
+
+  Albert Bridge, 26, 224
+
+  Albert Embankment, the, 32
+
+  Albert Hall, 213, 468
+
+  Albert Memorial, 397
+
+  All Hallows Staining, tower of, 55, 81
+
+  "Almack's," 181
+
+  Amen Court, 97
+
+  American Tourists in London, 299
+
+  Ancient Tomb-portraits, 348
+
+  Anne Askew, burning of, 65
+
+  Antiquarian zeal, 55
+
+  Appian Way, our, 193
+
+  Apsley House, 378
+
+  Arnold, Sir Edwin, on a mummy-case, 336
+
+  Arnold, Matthew, on Kensington Gardens, 395;
+    on the legend of Westminster Abbey, 188;
+    lecture at Toynbee Hall, 174
+
+  Artists in Kensington, 217
+
+  Ashbee, C. R., 176
+
+  "Asia Minor," 295
+
+  Asiatics in the East End, 295
+
+  Astor Estate Office, 42
+
+  "Augusta," 2, 21
+
+
+  B
+
+  Baby-farms, 431
+
+  Bacon, Francis, 139, 160
+
+  Bank Holiday, 434
+
+  Bankside theatres, 128
+
+  Barclay and Perkins's brewery, 129
+
+  Barnard's Inn, 159
+
+  Barnett, Canon, 173
+
+  Barry, Sir Charles, 205
+
+  Bartholomew Fair, 64
+
+  Battersea Park, 27, 224, 400
+
+  Beauchamp Tower, 106
+
+  Beaumont, Sir George, 354
+
+  Bedford Court, 246
+
+  Bedford House, 242
+
+  Ben Jonson, 153
+
+  Benson, Archbishop, 471
+
+  Berkeley Square, 379
+
+  Berners Street hoax, 370
+
+  Besant, Sir Walter, 8, 13, 24
+
+  Bevis Marks, 80
+
+  Billingsgate, 43, 316
+
+  Birds in London, 400, 410
+
+  Birkbeck Bank, 156
+
+  Bishopsgate Street, 76
+
+  Blackfriars, 13, 42
+
+  Blake, William, 26, 251, 349, 380, 384
+
+  "Bleak House," 144, 148, 154, 159, 261
+
+  "Blenheim Raphael," 344
+
+  Bloody Tower, 104
+
+  Bloomsbury, 238, 247
+
+  Bloomsbury Square, 243, 245
+
+  Blue mist, 23, 27, 388, 471
+
+  Boarding-houses, 263, 427
+
+  Bolt Court, 364
+
+  Bond Street, 176
+
+  Book-shops, 305
+
+  Booth, Charles, 446
+
+  Borough High Street, 126
+
+  Botanical Gardens, 406
+
+  Botticelli, 351
+
+  Bridge of Sighs, English, 40
+
+  British Museum, 333
+
+  Broad Sanctuary, 204
+
+  "Brompton Boilers," the, 341
+
+  Brompton Oratory, 215
+
+  Brontes, the, 97
+
+  Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 380
+
+  Browning, Robert, on view from the dome of St. Paul's, 51
+
+  Buckland, Frank, 230
+
+  Burglars in London, 442
+
+  Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 252, 369
+
+  Butler, Samuel, 42
+
+  Byron's view of London, 449
+
+
+  C
+
+  Cabs in London, 423
+
+  Cabmen, wages of, 425
+
+  Calverley's "Savoyard," 289
+
+  Campden Hill, 217
+
+  Canova, 40
+
+  Canterbury Pilgrims, the, 126
+
+  Carlton House, 181
+
+  Carlton House Terrace, 181
+
+  Carlton Restaurant, 322
+
+  Carlyle, on the Press, 14;
+    on Westminster Abbey, 193;
+    on Cheyne Row, 225;
+    on the Leigh Hunts, 226;
+    his London homes, 261;
+    on the British Museum reading-room, 268;
+    and the omnibus conductor, 422
+
+  Carlyle House, the, 224
+
+  Carlyle, statue of, 226
+
+  Carlyle, Mrs., 225, 260, 392, 442
+
+  Carpaccio, 352
+
+  Caryatids on St. Pancras Church, 409, 459
+
+  Casual wards, 441
+
+  Catherine of Braganza, 36, 228
+
+  Cats in London, 409
+
+  Chained books at Chelsea Old Church, 234
+
+  Chancery Lane, 148
+
+  Chapter Coffee House, 97, 183
+
+  Charles I., 205
+
+  Charles II., 201, 400
+
+  Charterhouse, 9, 68
+
+  Charterhouse Square, 67, 464
+
+  Chatham, Lord, 192
+
+  Chatterton, 183, 427
+
+  Chaucer's Inns, 126
+
+  Cheapside, 81
+
+  Chelsea, 26, 222, 235
+
+  Chelsea Bun-house, 222, 236
+
+  Chelsea Embankment, 235
+
+  Chelsea Ferry, 235
+
+  Chelsea Hospital, 236
+
+  Chelsea Old Church, 231, 233
+
+  "Cheshire Cheese," the, 366
+
+  Chesterfield House, 378
+
+  Cheyne Row, 224
+
+  Cheyne Walk, 26, 227
+
+  Chichester Rents, 148
+
+  Christina of Denmark, 351
+
+  Christ's Hospital, 9
+
+  Churches:--
+    All Hallows, Barking, 115
+    Great St. Helen's, 77
+    Holy Trinity, Minories, 114
+    St. Alphage, London Wall, 82
+    St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield, 56
+    St. Botolph, 114
+    St. Dunstan-in-the-West, 151
+    St. Edmund the King and Martyr, 80
+    St. Ethelburga, 79
+    St. Giles, Cripplegate, 12, 81
+    St. John's Chapel (in the White Tower), 108
+    St. John's, Clerkenwell, 73
+    St. Magnus, 27, 44
+    St. Margaret's, Westminster, 202
+    St. Mary, Aldermanbury, 81
+    St. Mary, Lambeth, 31
+    St. Mary Overy, 122
+    St. Michael's, Cornhill, 75
+    St. Olave's, Hart Street, 117
+    St. Pancras, 265, 458
+    St. Paul, Covent Garden, 318
+    St. Peter-ad-Vincula, 105
+    St. Peter-upon-Cornhill, 75
+    St. Saviour's, Southwark, 122
+    St. Swithin's, 82
+
+  Church House, Kensington, 220
+
+  Church House, Westminster, 204
+
+  "Church of Humanity," 260
+
+  "Church Parade," 390, 401
+
+  City Companies, the, 14
+
+  Classical Fever in London, 457
+
+  Clement's Inn, 148
+
+  "Cleopatra's Needle," 36
+
+  Clifford's Inn, 150
+
+  "Clink," the, 129
+
+  Clive, Lord, 379
+
+  Cloth Fair, 58, 64
+
+  Clothworkers' Hall, 55
+
+  Coal Exchange, the, 316
+
+  Cobbett, 23
+
+  Cock Lane Ghost, the, 73
+
+  "Cockney," derivation of, 436
+
+  Cole, Vicat, 49
+
+  Coleridge, 158
+
+  Collins, Wilkie, 261
+
+  Comedy Restaurant, Panton Street, 322
+
+  Common lodging-houses, 441
+
+  Constable, 347, 355
+
+  Conway, Moncure D., 462, 463
+
+  Coronation Chairs, 200
+
+  Costermongers, 437
+
+  County Council, the, 400
+
+  Court of Pie Powdre, 64
+
+  Covent Garden Market, 317
+
+  Covent Garden, old taverns of, 318
+
+  Cromwell, 153, 199
+
+  Crosby Hall, 55, 77
+
+  Curzon Street, 373, 380
+
+
+  D
+
+  Darwin, Charles, 258
+
+  Davidson, John, on "The Loafer," 186
+
+  Dean's Yard, 202
+
+  Defoe, on Pall Mall, 183
+
+  Detectives in shops, 309
+
+  Dickens, on waterside scenes, 50;
+    the Marshalsea, 130, 134;
+    City churches, 115;
+    as the chronicler of London, 136;
+    on the Borough, 128;
+    Fountain Court, 143;
+    Staple Inn, 155;
+    Barnard's Inn, 159;
+    his social satires, 177;
+    his grave, 193;
+    on decaying houses, 240;
+    Bloomsbury types, 262;
+    his private theatricals, 261;
+    Cockney types, 312;
+    on London houses, 362
+
+  Dining, the art of, 322
+
+  Disappearing landmarks, 361
+
+  Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), on Regent's Park, 17;
+    on class differences in London, 162;
+    his death in Curzon Street, 373;
+    on Kensington Gardens, 395
+
+  D'Israeli, Isaac, 243
+
+  Docks, the, 47
+
+  "Doggett" badge, 235
+
+  "Domesday Book," 151
+
+  Downing Street, 374
+
+  Drama, popular tastes with regard to, 282
+
+  Dress of the poor, conventionalities in, 312
+
+
+  E
+
+  Earl's Court, 220
+
+  Earl's Terrace, 218
+
+  Eastcheap, 81, 118
+
+  East End, the, 168
+
+  Edward the Confessor, 189
+
+  Edwardes Square, 217
+
+  "Edwin Drood," 155, 295
+
+  Eighteenth Century, London in, 179
+
+  Elgin Marbles, the, 340
+
+  Eliot, George, 227
+
+  "Esmond," 220, 228, 392
+
+  Evelyn's Diary, 242
+
+  Eyre Street Hill, 292
+
+
+  F
+
+  Factory-girls, 437
+
+  Farm Street Roman Catholic Church, 177
+
+  Fetter Lane, 159
+
+  Fiction stronger than reality, 10, 363, 381
+
+  "First nights," 280
+
+  Fleet Street, 364
+
+  Fleur-de-Lis Court, 156
+
+  Flowers, London children's love for, 321, 402
+
+  Flowers, in Regent's Park, 402
+
+  Flower-girls, 318, 437
+
+  Folly Ditch, 51
+
+  Fore Street, 81
+
+  Foreign waiters, 288
+
+  Foundling hospital, 263
+
+  "Fountain Court," 143
+
+  "Four-in-hand Club," 390
+
+  "Fremdenindustrie" in London, 290
+
+  French furniture at Hertford House, 331
+
+  French School of Painting at Hertford House, 331
+
+  Frith's reminiscences, 258
+
+  Frost Fairs, 44
+
+  Froude, J. A., on ancient tombs, 196;
+    the dissolution of the Carthusian monastery, 68;
+    Anne Boleyn, 105
+
+  Furnival's Inn, 159
+
+
+  G
+
+  Gainsborough, 353
+
+  "Gallery of Instruction," 338
+
+  "Gandish's," 252, 258
+
+  Gardens, making of, in London, 408
+
+  Gardens, private, in London houses, 406
+
+  "Gatti's," 290
+
+  "Gaunt House" of "Vanity Fair," 378
+
+  Gibbon, 463
+
+  Gladstone, W. E., on Bloomsbury, 247;
+    his London residences, 373;
+    on the way to see London, 414
+
+  Godfrey, Sir Edmondsbury, 36
+
+  Goldsmith, Oliver, 147, 367
+
+  Gordon Riots, 243
+
+  Gordon Square, 260
+
+  Gothic style in London, 452-459
+
+  Gough House, Chelsea, 236
+
+  Gough Square (Dr. Johnson's house), 364
+
+  Gower Street, 258
+
+  Gower's tomb, 123
+
+  Grant Allen, 23, 337
+
+  Gray's Inn, 139, 159
+
+  "Grange," the, North End, 368
+
+  Great Coram Street, 263
+
+  "Great Expectations," 159
+
+  Great Fire, the, 7, 86
+
+  Great Ormond Street, 254, 464
+
+  Great Tower Hill, 113
+
+  Greenwich, 51
+
+  Greuze's Pictures, 332
+
+  Grosvenor Road, 28
+
+  "Grub Street," 64
+
+  "Guild and School of Handicraft," 176
+
+  Guy's Hospital, 133
+
+  Gwynne, Nell, 232, 236
+
+
+  H
+
+  Hair-Dressing, Ethics of, 286
+
+  "Hand of Ethelberta, The," 12
+
+  Hare, A. J. C., on St. Thomas's Hospital, 29;
+    Chelsea Embankment, 32;
+    Gray's Inn Garden, 139;
+    Thames Street, 316;
+    Holland House, 382
+
+  Hatton Garden, 292, 439
+
+  Haunted Houses, 379
+
+  Haydon, 395
+
+  Haweis, Rev. H. R., 229
+
+  Hawthorne, 90, 155, 160
+
+  Herschel, 257
+
+  Hertford House, 327
+
+  "Hiring-Fair," Jewish, 297
+
+  Hogarth, 63, 265, 368
+
+  Holbein, 351
+
+  Holborn Restaurant, 322
+
+  Holland House, 382
+
+  Holly Lodge, 383
+
+  Holman Hunt, W., 252
+
+  Holywell Street, 147
+
+  "Homes for the People," 465
+
+  Hood, Thomas, 40
+
+  Hook, Theodore, 370
+
+  Hotel Cecil, 33
+
+  Hotels, palatial, 32
+
+  Houndsditch, 79
+
+  Houses, historic, 358
+
+  Houses, humanity of, 245
+
+  Houses of Parliament, 29, 205
+
+  "Humphry Clinker" (and Covent Garden), 319
+
+  Humphry Ward, Mrs., 257
+
+  Hunter Street, Bloomsbury, 262
+
+  Hyde Park, 386
+
+
+  I
+
+  Ice-Cream Trade, 292
+
+  Inchbald, Elizabeth, 218
+
+  Inigo Jones, 454
+
+  Inland Revenue Office, 36
+
+  Inns of Court, the, 137
+
+  Iron-work, old, on houses, 379
+
+  Irving, Edward, 260
+
+  Irvingite Church, 260
+
+  Italian Colony in London, the, 292
+
+
+  J
+
+  Jack Cade, 44
+
+  "Jacob's Island," 51
+
+  Jersey, Lady, 181, 380
+
+  Jerusalem Chamber, 203
+
+  Johnson, Dr., 73, 91, 138, 147, 363
+
+
+  K
+
+  Katherine Howard, 105, 129
+
+  Kensington, 210
+
+  Kensington Gardens, 394
+
+  "Kensington House," 219
+
+  Kensington Palace, 382, 394, 465
+
+  Kensington Square, 220, 464
+
+  King's Bench Walk, Temple, 147
+
+  Kingsley, Charles, 47
+
+  Kingsley, Henry, 233
+
+  King's Road, Chelsea, 232
+
+  Knightsbridge Road, 212
+
+
+  L
+
+  Lady Jane Grey, 107
+
+  Lady lecturers, 330, 333, 342
+
+  Lamb, Charles, 139, 147, 160
+
+  Lamb's Conduit Street, 260, 265
+
+  Lambeth Palace, 29
+
+  Lang, Andrew, 37, 320
+
+  Lant Street, 130
+
+  Laud, Archbishop, 31
+
+  Law Courts, 460
+
+  Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 245
+
+  Lawson, Cecil, 227
+
+  Leadenhall Market, 3
+
+  Lear, Edward, 259
+
+  Leech, John, 263, 439
+
+  Leicester Square, 285
+
+  Leigh Hunt, 217, 226
+
+  Leighton House, the, 377
+
+  Lennox, Sarah, 382
+
+  Levy, Miss Amy, on plane trees in London, 408;
+    on London isolation, 426
+
+  Liddon, Canon, 97
+
+  Life of London, the, 285
+
+  Lincoln's Inn, 152
+
+  Lincoln's Inn Fields, 154
+
+  Little Britain, 64
+
+  "Little Dorrit," 132, 177, 264
+
+  "Little Midshipman, the," 115
+
+  Lollard's Tower, the, 30
+
+  Lombard Street, 80
+
+  London: atmospheric effects, 388, 412, 450;
+    approach to, 23;
+    architecture, 460;
+    the cult of, 20;
+    charm of, in early summer, 385, 400;
+    cosmopolitanism of, 285;
+    crowds, 282;
+    classes in, 162;
+    contrasts in, 19, 54, 151, 167, 175;
+    crazes, 445;
+    colouring of, 388, 412;
+    feeding of, 48;
+    houses, characteristics of, 359, 462;
+    isolation in, 426;
+    liberty in, 429;
+    opportunities in, 327;
+    phoenix-like, 24, 95, 181;
+    picturesqueness of, 49, 388, 411;
+    primarily a seaport, 24;
+    resources in, 17;
+    rebuilding of, 466;
+    suffering in, 427, 429;
+    as a tourist haunt, 33;
+    unexpectedness of, 10, 18, 54;
+    wealth of, 47
+
+  London Bridge, 43, 121
+
+  Londoners, ways of, 414, 416, 462
+
+  London Stone, 82
+
+  London Wall, 81, 82
+
+  Lost children, 442
+
+  Lowther Lodge, 213, 460
+
+  Ludgate Hill, 93
+
+  Lyon's Inn, 159
+
+
+  M
+
+  Macaulay, on the tombs of Chatham and Pitt, 192;
+    Westminster Hall, 205;
+    his residence at Holly Lodge, 217, 383;
+    in Powis Place, 255;
+    on Holland House, 383;
+    the New Zealander, 472
+
+  Maclise, Daniel, 227
+
+  Mall, the, 397
+
+  Manning, Cardinal, 177
+
+  Mansfield, Lord, 243
+
+  Mansions and Flats, 468
+
+  Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury, 262
+
+  Marco Marziale, 349
+
+  Marshall, Herbert, 388
+
+  Marshalsea, the, 130
+
+  Marshalsea Court, 150
+
+  "Martin Chuzzlewit," 118, 143
+
+  Matinee Hat, 282
+
+  Maurice, F. D., 245, 256
+
+  Mausolus, car of (in British Museum), 270, 338
+
+  "May-Day Sweeps," 259
+
+  Mecklenburgh Square, 265
+
+  Mercers' School, 159
+
+  Meredith, George, 228
+
+  Michael Angelo, 354
+
+  Middle Temple Hall, 143
+
+  Middle Temple Lane, 144
+
+  Millais, Sir John, 259
+
+  Millbank Penitentiary, Old, 28
+
+  Millionaires, Uses of, 327
+
+  Milton, 63, 371
+
+  Mincing Lane, 81
+
+  Minories, the, 113
+
+  Mitford, Mary Russell, 245
+
+  Model lodging-houses, 468
+
+  Monasteries, the fall of, 13
+
+  Montague House, 269, 333, 379
+
+  Monument, the, 43, 118
+
+  Monumental Brasses, 115
+
+  Monumental Sculpture, 91, 193
+
+  More, Sir Thomas, 110, 233
+
+  Morley, Charles, quoted, 131
+
+  Morris, William, 252
+
+  Mother Shipton, 387
+
+  Mourey, Gabriel, on the view from Charing Cross Bridge, 38;
+    the Tower Bridge, 45;
+    the Pool of London, 46;
+    character in hair-dressing, 286;
+    street markets, 312;
+    Sunday in London, 440;
+    London fog, 445;
+    Regent's Park terraces, 451;
+    Philip Webb's houses, 465
+
+  Mudie's Library, 305
+
+  Mudlarks, 28
+
+  Mummy-room at the British Museum, 335
+
+  "Murdstone and Grinby's," 50, 134
+
+  Museum Habitues, 268
+
+  "Museum Headache," 337
+
+
+  N
+
+  Nando's Coffee House, 145
+
+  Nash, 457
+
+  National Gallery, 344;
+    romance of, 346, 354
+
+  Natural History Museum, 342, 469
+
+  "Newcomes," The, 69
+
+  New Inn, 148
+
+  Newsboys, 443
+
+  Newton Hall, 158
+
+  Newton, Sir Isaac, 158
+
+  New War Office, 455
+
+  Nithsdale, Lord (escape from the Tower), 111
+
+  Norman London, 4
+
+
+  O
+
+  Old Clothes Markets, 315
+
+  "Old Curiosity Shop," 50, 80, 135
+
+  Old Palace Yard, 207
+
+  Old St. Paul's, 88
+
+  Old Swan Tavern, 235
+
+  "Oliver Twist," 51
+
+  Omnibuses, character in, 420
+
+  Omnibus Conductors, 418
+
+  Omnibus travelling, 417
+
+  Open air services, 98
+
+  Opium Dens, 296
+
+  O'Rell, Max, on the Parks, 390;
+    London omnibuses, 417;
+    London fog, 444
+
+  Organ-grinders, 263, 439
+
+  Ornithological Society, 399
+
+  "Our Mutual Friend," 50
+
+  Oxford Street, 18
+
+
+  P
+
+  Pall Mall, 183
+
+  Panizzi, 247
+
+  "Pan-opticon" of Leicester Square, 326
+
+  Pantomimes, 277
+
+  Panyer Alley, 97
+
+  Paradise Row, 232
+
+  "Paris Garden," 128
+
+  Park Orators, 392, 403
+
+  Parmigiano, 350
+
+  Passmore Edwards Settlement, 256
+
+  Patent Office, 156
+
+  Paternoster Row, 95
+
+  Pater, Walter, 218, 467
+
+  Paul's Cross, 98
+
+  Paul Pindar's House, 55, 342
+
+  "Paul's Walkers," 88
+
+  Pavement Artists, 248
+
+  Penny Steamers, 25
+
+  Pepys, Samuel, 116, 139
+
+  Philanthropists, treatment of, in London, 448
+
+  Physick Garden, the, 234
+
+  Picture-galleries, 330, 343
+
+  Picture Stories, 346
+
+  Pitman's Shorthand Institute, 246
+
+  Pictures, vicissitudes of, 346, 351, 353
+
+  Picturesqueness of Railways, 23, 95
+
+  Pigeon-fanciers, 315
+
+  Plane-trees in London, 408
+
+  Plantagenets, cuts of, 198
+
+  Poet's Corner, 202
+
+  Point of View, the, 164, 169, 172
+
+  Policemen, 425, 442
+
+  Pool of London, the, 44, 46
+
+  Popular "lines" in shops, 301
+
+  "Portland Vase," 336
+
+  Positivist Society, 138
+
+  Press, the, 369
+
+  Primrose Hill, view from, 413
+
+  Prince of Wales's Theatre, old, 284
+
+  Printing-House Square, 14
+
+  Prior Bolton, 62
+
+  Prior Houghton, 68
+
+  Protector Somerset, 35, 73
+
+  Prudential Assurance Company's Offices, 154, 159, 469
+
+  Pyx, Chapel of, 190, 203
+
+
+  Q
+
+  Quality Court, 156
+
+  Queen Anne, 201
+
+  Queen Anne Craze, the, 460
+
+  Queen Anne's Gate, 397
+
+  Queen Anne's Statue, Ludgate Hill, 95;
+    Queen Square, 241
+
+  Queen Caroline (wife of George II.), 394, 399
+
+  Queen Caroline (of Brunswick), 202, 370
+
+  Queen Charlotte, 36
+
+  Queen Elizabeth, 25, 51, 201
+
+  Queen Mary (of Modena), 31
+
+  Queen Mary II., 201
+
+  Queen Victoria, visit to St. Paul's, 93;
+    at Kensington Palace, 395
+
+  Queen's House, Chelsea, 227
+
+  Queen Square, 241, 254, 264
+
+
+  R
+
+  Ragged Children, erudition of, 234, 433
+
+  Ragged Schools, 432
+
+  Rahere, 58
+
+  Raleigh, 107
+
+  "Ranelagh," 222
+
+  Reading-room, British Museum, 266
+
+  "Reconciliation," Temple of, 192-199
+
+  Record Office, 151
+
+  Red Lion Square, 253, 254
+
+  Reformation, the, 8, 62
+
+  "Reformer's Tree," the, 392
+
+  Regalia, 109
+
+  Regent's Park, 401
+
+  Restaurants, cheap, 287, 322
+
+  "Restorers," sins of, 125
+
+  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 354
+
+  Richardson, Samuel, 367
+
+  Richmond's Mosaics in St. Paul's, 93
+
+  "Ring, The," 391
+
+  Rocques', Map of, 1746, 241
+
+  Rogers, Samuel, 181
+
+  Rolls Chapel, 151
+
+  Roman City Wall, 81
+
+  Roman London, 24
+
+  Roman Remains, 3, 82, 97, 103
+
+  "Rosamond's Pond," 399
+
+  Rosebery, Lord, on St. James's Square, 184
+
+  "Rosetta Stone," the, 339
+
+  Rossetti, Christina, 251
+
+  Rossetti, D. G., at Queen's House, Chelsea, 227;
+    at Red Lion Square, 252;
+    at the Working Men's College, 256;
+    on the British Museum, 270;
+    on Venetian Gothic in London, 469
+
+  Rotten Row, 390
+
+  Royal Exchange, 74, 75
+
+  Royal Mint, 113
+
+  Royal Society, 158
+
+  Rubens, 351
+
+  Ruskin, on the Houses of Parliament, 32;
+    Victoria Embankment, 41;
+    the Pool of London, 49;
+    Social Contrasts, 185;
+    South Kensington Museum, 341;
+    born in Hunter Street, 262;
+    at the Working Men's College, 256;
+    at Denmark Hill, 371
+
+  Russell, Lady Rachel, 242
+
+  Russell, Lord William, 154, 242
+
+  Russell Hotel, 247
+
+  Russell Square, 244
+
+  Rye House Plot, 242
+
+
+  S
+
+  "Sailors' Town," the, 49
+
+  St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 66
+
+  St. James's Park, 397
+
+  St. James's Place, 179
+
+  St. James's Square, 184
+
+  St. James's Street, 178
+
+  St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell, 72
+
+  St. Pancras Station, 27, 265, 471
+
+  St. Paul's Cathedral, 42, 51, 84
+
+  St. Paul's Churchyard, 95
+
+  St. Paul's School, 98
+
+  St. Thomas's Hospital, 29
+
+  Sala, G. A., 265
+
+  Sale-Days, 311
+
+  Saleswomen, trials of, 302
+
+  Sandford Manor House, 232
+
+  Sass's School, 258
+
+  Savoy Hotel, 33
+
+  Saxon London, 4
+
+  Scents, in London districts, 420
+
+  Scotland Yard, 33
+
+  Scott, W. B., 256
+
+  Sea-gulls in London, 35, 121
+
+  Seamy Side, the, 185, 248, 441
+
+  Sebert, King of the East Saxons, 188
+
+  Second-hand Book-shops, 266, 305
+
+  "Secular Gothic," 469
+
+  Seething Lane, 116
+
+  Serjeants' Inn, 149
+
+  Shaw, Norman, 33, 235, 460
+
+  Shelley, in Marchmont Street, 262;
+    in Half Moon Street, 361;
+    in Poland Street, 381;
+    on Hell and London, 297;
+    in the Highgate omnibus, 417
+
+  Shelley, Harriet, 394
+
+  Shelley, Mary, 262
+
+  Ships' figure-heads, 29
+
+  Shops of London, 299
+
+  Shoppers, ways of, 301
+
+  Shop-lifters, 309
+
+  Siddons, Mrs., 371
+
+  "Sixpenny Days," drawbacks of, 195
+
+  "Sketches by Boz," 240, 259, 262
+
+  Sloane, Sir Hans, 228, 234, 243, 333
+
+  Slum children, 430
+
+  Smart Society in London, 179, 390
+
+  Smetham, James, 355
+
+  Smithfield Martyrs, 64
+
+  Soane Museum, 375
+
+  Soane, Sir John, 376, 457
+
+  Somerset House, 35, 451-452
+
+  Soot as a beautifier, 23, 27, 90, 388, 452, 470
+
+  South Kensington, 222
+
+  South Kensington Museum, 341
+
+  South Sea Bubble, 76, 133
+
+  Southwark, 121
+
+  Sparrows in London, 410
+
+  Spinello Aretino, 348
+
+  Spitalfields, 314
+
+  "Spleen," the, 444
+
+  Squares of Queen Anne's Time, 464
+
+  Squares, Old London, charm of, 244
+
+  Stael, Madame de, 23
+
+  Stage Door, the, 284
+
+  Stage Neophytes, 275
+
+  Stage rehearsals, 279
+
+  Stanley, Dean, 187, 233
+
+  Staple Inn, 55, 154
+
+  Steele, Sir Richard, 243
+
+  "Steyne, Lord," 327
+
+  Stones of London, the, 447-472
+
+  Street Arabs, 434
+
+  Street games, 432
+
+  Street markets, 311
+
+  Stuart, Arabella, 111, 197
+
+  Stuart, La Belle, 201
+
+  Submerged, the, 170, 185
+
+  Sunday in London, 440
+
+  Sunday markets, 314
+
+  "Sunday opening," 326-335
+
+  Sunsets in London, 250
+
+  Sutherland House, 378
+
+  Sutton, Thomas, 69
+
+  "Sweating" dens, 297, 302
+
+  Swift, Dean, 177
+
+  Swinburne, A. C., 228, 369
+
+  Swindles in London, 443
+
+  Swiss Waiters, 287
+
+
+  T
+
+  Taine, Henri, on Greek Architecture in London, 32;
+    the docks, 48;
+    the ways of "good society," 279;
+    Englishwomen, 286;
+    the London Sunday, 326;
+    British seriousness, 392;
+    Somerset House, 451;
+    the Houses of Parliament, 459
+
+  Tanagra figurines (in British Museum), 339
+
+  Tanfield Court, Temple, 147
+
+  Tate Gallery, the, 27, 343
+
+  Tate, Sir Henry, 28, 343
+
+  Tavistock House, 258, 261
+
+  Temple, the, 149;
+    Gardens, 141;
+    Church, 145
+
+  Tennant, Miss Dorothy (Lady Stanley), 431
+
+  Tennyson, Alfred Lord, on Cleopatra's Needle, 39;
+    "London's central roar," 95
+
+  Terburg's "Peace of Muenster," 332, 350
+
+  Terra-cotta, in building, 470
+
+  Terriss, William, 284
+
+  Thackeray, in Cornhill, 76;
+    in Great Coram Street, 263;
+    in Kensington, 216, 220, 382;
+    on old Carlton House, 181;
+    Russell Square, 246;
+    Denmark Hill, 371;
+    the "Zoo," 405
+
+  Thackeray, Miss ("Old Kensington"), 213
+
+  Thames, influence on history of London, 2, 24
+
+  Thames, Enchantment of, 49
+
+  Thames Street, 43, 316
+
+  Thavies' Inn, 159
+
+  Theatrical Profession, the, 274
+
+  Thompson, Henry Yates, 344
+
+  "Thorney Island," 188
+
+  "Time Machine," the, 20
+
+  Tite Street, 236
+
+  "Tom-All-Alone's," 58
+
+  Tomb of Gordon, 92;
+    Lord Leighton, 92;
+    Duke of Wellington, 92
+
+  Tooley Street, 43, 126
+
+  Torch Extinguishers, 379
+
+  "Totencourt," Manor of, 18, 242, 387
+
+  Tottenham Court Road, 18
+
+  Tourists in London, 247, 424
+
+  Tower, the, 46, 100
+
+  Tower Bridge, 44
+
+  Tower Green, 105
+
+  Tower Lions, the, 112
+
+  Tower Victims, 105
+
+  Toynbee, Arnold, 173
+
+  Toynbee Hall, 173
+
+  Trades, special districts for, 308
+
+  "Traitor's Gate," 104, 110
+
+  Treasure-houses of London, 326
+
+  Trinity Square, 113, 464
+
+  Turner, J. M. W., R.A., 26, 49, 347, 355, 357, 380
+
+  Tyburn, 113
+
+
+  U
+
+  Unrevealing Exteriors, 359
+
+
+  V
+
+  Valhalla, national, 191
+
+  Vandyck, 351-354
+
+  Van Eyck, 353
+
+  Vanishing London, 360
+
+  "Vanity Fair," 246
+
+  "Vauxhall," 222
+
+  "Venetian Gothic," 469
+
+  Vergers, ways of, 105
+
+  Veronese, Paolo, 353, 355
+
+  Victoria Embankment, 32, 41
+
+  Views in London, 29, 35, 38, 42, 46, 49, 51, 265, 389, 394, 411-412
+
+  "Virginians," the, 381
+
+  Visitors to London, 424
+
+
+  W
+
+  Waifs and Strays, 429, 440
+
+  Wallace, Sir Richard, 65, 328, 332
+
+  Wallace Collection, 327
+
+  Wallace, Lady, 329
+
+  Walworth, Sir William, 65
+
+  "Wanderlust," the, 289
+
+  Warwick Square, 97
+
+  Watling Street, 3
+
+  Waterloo Bridge, 40
+
+  Wat Tyler, 65
+
+  Webb, Aston, 60
+
+  Webb, Philip, 465
+
+  Weller, Sam, 128
+
+  Wellington, Duke of, 378
+
+  Westminster Abbey, 187;
+    chapel of Henry VII., 190, 197;
+    chantry of Henry V., 194;
+    cloisters, 203;
+    wax effigies, 200
+
+  Westminster Bridge, 207
+
+  Westminster Hall, 205
+
+  Where to shop, 303
+
+  Whistler, J. McN., 23, 236
+
+  Whitechapel Road, 18, 172
+
+  Whitefield's Tabernacle, 242, 261
+
+  Whitefriars, 13
+
+  Whitehall, 455
+
+  Whitehall Court, 33
+
+  "White Tower," 108
+
+  Whittington, 9
+
+  Wimpole Street, 380
+
+  Winchester House (old), 129
+
+  "Window gardens," 407
+
+  "Wittenagemot" Club, 97
+
+  Wood Street plane tree, 10, 81
+
+  "Working Men's College, The," 255
+
+  Working Classes, 168
+
+  Wren, Sir Christopher, 7, 86
+
+  Wych Street, 148
+
+
+  Y
+
+  Yiddish colony in London, the, 295
+
+  York House, old, 35
+
+  York Stairs, 35
+
+
+  Z
+
+  Zoological Gardens, 405
+
+
+THE END
+
+  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS. LTD.,
+  BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
+
+
+
+
+THE HIGHWAYS & BYWAYS SERIES.
+
+  Extra crown 8vo. =7s. 6d.= net each.
+
+  POCKET EDITION. The volumes marked with an asterisk (*).
+  Fcap. 8vo. Cloth. _6s._ net. Leather, 7_s._ 6_d._ net each.
+
+
+=Berkshire.= By JAMES EDMUND VINCENT. With Illustrations by FREDERICK
+L. GRIGGS.
+
+_DAILY CHRONICLE._--"We consider this book one of the best in an
+admirable series, and one which should appeal to all who love this
+kind of literature."
+
+
+* =The Border.= By ANDREW LANG and JOHN LANG. With Illustrations by
+HUGH THOMSON.
+
+_STANDARD._--"The reader on his travels, real or imaginary, could not
+have pleasanter or more profitable companionship. There are charming
+sketches by Mr. Hugh Thomson to illustrate the letterpress."
+
+
+=Buckinghamshire.= By CLEMENT SHORTER. With Illustrations by FREDERICK
+L. GRIGGS.
+
+_WORLD._--"A thoroughly delightful little volume. Mr. Frederick L.
+Griggs contributes a copious series of delicately graceful
+illustrations."
+
+
+=Cambridge and Ely.= By Rev. EDWARD CONYBEARE. With Illustrations by
+FREDERICK L. GRIGGS.
+
+_ATHENAEUM._--"A volume which, light and easily read as it is deserves
+to rank with the best literature about the county."
+
+
+=Derbyshire.= By J. B. FIRTH. With Illustrations by NELLY ERICHSEN.
+
+_DAILY TELEGRAPH._--"The result is altogether delightful, for
+'Derbyshire' is as attractive to the reader in his arm-chair as to the
+tourist wandering amid the scenes Mr. Firth describes so well."
+
+
+* =Devon and Cornwall.= By ARTHUR H. NORWAY. With Illustrations by
+JOSEPH PENNELL and HUGH THOMSON.
+
+_DAILY CHRONICLE._--"So delightful that we would gladly fill columns
+with extracts were space as elastic as imagination.... The text is
+excellent: the illustrations of it are even better."
+
+
+=Donegal and Antrim.= By STEPHEN GWYNN. With Illustrations by HUGH
+THOMSON.
+
+_DAILY TELEGRAPH._--"A perfect book of its kind, on which author,
+artist, and publisher have lavished of their best."
+
+
+* =Dorset.= By Sir FREDERICK TREVES. With Illustrations by JOSEPH
+PENNELL.
+
+_STANDARD._--"A breezy, delightful book, full of sidelights on men and
+manners, and quick in the interpretation of all the half-inarticulate
+lore of the countryside."
+
+
+* =East Anglia.= By WILLIAM A. DUTT. With Illustrations by JOSEPH
+PENNELL.
+
+_WORLD._--"Of all the fascinating volumes in the 'Highways and Byways'
+series, none is more pleasant to read.... Mr. Dutt, himself an East
+Anglian, writes most sympathetically and in picturesque style of the
+district."
+
+
+* =Galloway and Carrick.= By the REV. C. H. DICK. With Illustrations by
+HUGH THOMSON.
+
+_SATURDAY REVIEW._--"The very book to take with one into that romantic
+angle of Scotland, which lies well aside of the beaten tourist track."
+
+
+* =Hampshire.= By D. H. MOUTRAY READ. With Illustrations by ARTHUR B.
+CONNOR.
+
+_STANDARD._--"In our judgment, as excellent and as lively a book as
+has yet appeared in the Highways and Byways Series."
+
+
+* =Thomas Hardy's Wessex.= By HERMANN LEA. With Illustrations from
+Photographs by the Author. [_Pocket Edition only._
+
+
+=Hertfordshire.= By HERBERT W. TOMPKINS, F. R. Hist. S. With
+Illustrations by FREDERICK L. GRIGGS.
+
+_WESTMINSTER GAZETTE._--" A very charming book.... Will delight
+equally the artistic and the poetic, the historical and the
+antiquarian, the picturesque and the sentimental kinds of tourist."
+
+
+* =Kent.= By WALTER JERROLD. With Illustrations by HUGH THOMSON.
+
+_PALL MALL GAZETTE._--"A book over which it is a pleasure to pore, and
+which every man of Kent or Kentish man, or 'foreigner,' should
+promptly steal, purchase, or borrow.... The illustrations alone are
+worth twice the money charged for the book."
+
+
+* =Lake District.= By A. G. BRADLEY. With Illustrations by JOSEPH
+PENNELL.
+
+_ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE._--"A notable edition--an engaging volume, packed
+with the best of all possible guidance for tourists. For the most part
+the artist's work is as exquisite as anything of the kind he has
+done."
+
+
+=Leicestershire.= By J. B. FIRTH. With Illustrations by FREDERICK L.
+GRIGGS. [_In the press._
+
+
+=Lincolnshire.= By W. F. RAWNSLEY. With Illustrations by FREDERICK L.
+GRIGGS.
+
+_PALL MALL GAZETTE._--"A splendid record of a storied shire."
+
+
+=London.= By Mrs. E. T. COOK. With Illustrations by HUGH THOMSON and
+FREDERICK L. GRIGGS.
+
+_GRAPHIC._--"Mrs. Cook is an admirable guide; she knows her London in
+and out; she is equally at home in writing of Mayfair and of City
+courts, and she has a wealth of knowledge relating to literary and
+historical associations. This, taken together with the fact that she
+is a writer who could not be dull if she tried, makes her book very
+delightful reading."
+
+
+=Middlesex.= By WALTER JERROLD. With Illustrations by HUGH THOMSON.
+
+_EVENING STANDARD._--"Every Londoner who wishes to multiply fourfold
+the interest of his roamings and excursions should beg, borrow, or buy
+it without a day's delay."
+
+
+* =Normandy.= By PERCY DEARMER, M.A. With Illustrations by JOSEPH
+PENNELL. [_Pocket Edition only._
+
+_ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE._--"A charming book.... Mr. Dearmer is as
+arrestive in his way as Mr. Pennell. He has the true topographic eye.
+He handles legend and history in entertaining fashion."
+
+
+* =Northamptonshire and Rutland.= By HERBERT A. EVANS. With
+Illustrations by FREDERICK L. GRIGGS. [_Pocket Edition only._
+
+_TIMES._--"A pleasant, gossiping record.... Mr. Evans is a guide who
+makes us want to see for ourselves the places he has seen."
+
+
+=Northumbria.= By P. ANDERSON GRAHAM. With Illustrations by HUGH
+THOMSON.
+
+_NATION._--"None of the contributors to the series has been more
+successful than Mr. Graham."
+
+
+* =Nottinghamshire.= By J. B. FIRTH. With Illustrations by FREDERICK L.
+GRIGGS.
+
+_DAILY TELEGRAPH._--"A book that will rank high in the series which it
+augments; a book that no student of our Midland topography and of
+Midland associations should miss."
+
+
+* =Oxford and the Cotswolds.= By H. A. EVANS. With Illustrations by
+FREDERICK L. GRIGGS.
+
+_DAILY TELEGRAPH._--"The author is everywhere entertaining and fresh,
+never allowing his own interest to flag, and thereby retaining the
+close attention of the reader."
+
+
+=Shakespeare's Country.= By The Ven. W. H. HUTTON. With Illustrations
+by EDMUND H. NEW.
+
+_PALL MALL GAZETTE._--"Mr. Edmund H. New has made a fine book a thing
+of beauty and a joy for ever by a series of lovely drawings."
+
+
+* =Somerset.= By EDWARD HUTTON. With Illustrations by NELLY ERICHSEN.
+
+_DAILY TELEGRAPH._--"A book which will set the heart of every
+West-country-man beating with enthusiasm, and with pride for the
+goodly heritage into which he has been born as a son of Somerset."
+
+
+* =Surrey.= By ERIC PARKER. With Illustrations by HUGH THOMSON.
+
+_SPECTATOR._--"A very charming book, both to dip into and to read....
+Every page is sown with something rare and curious."
+
+
+* =Sussex.= By E. V. LUCAS. With Illustrations by FREDERICK L. GRIGGS.
+
+_WESTMINSTER GAZETTE._--"A delightful addition to an excellent
+series.... Mr. Lucas's knowledge of Sussex is shown in so many fields,
+with so abundant and yet so natural a flow, that one is kept
+entertained and charmed through every passage of his devious
+progress."
+
+
+* =North Wales.= By A. G. BRADLEY. With Illustrations by HUGH THOMSON
+and JOSEPH PENNELL.
+
+_PALL MALL GAZETTE._--"To read this fine book makes us eager to visit
+every hill and every valley that Mr. Bradley describes with such
+tantalising enthusiasm. It is a work of inspiration, vivid, sparkling,
+and eloquent--a deep well of pleasure to every lover of Wales."
+
+
+=South Wales.= By A. G. BRADLEY. With Illustrations by FREDERICK L.
+GRIGGS.
+
+_SPECTATOR._--"Mr. Bradley has certainly exalted the writing of a
+combined archaeological and descriptive guide-book into a species of
+literary art. The result is fascinating."
+
+
+* =Wiltshire.= By EDWARD HUTTON. With Illustrations by NELLY ERICHSEN.
+
+_DAILY GRAPHIC._--"Replete with enjoyable and informing reading....
+Illustrated by exquisite sketches."
+
+
+* =Yorkshire.= By ARTHUR H. NORWAY. With Illustrations by JOSEPH
+PENNELL and HUGH THOMSON.
+
+_PALL MALL GAZETTE._--"The wonderful story of Yorkshire's past
+provides Mr. Norway with a wealth of interesting material, which he
+has used judiciously and well; each grey ruin of castle and abbey he
+has re-erected and re-peopled in the most delightful way. A better
+guide and story-teller it would be hard to find."
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Highways and Byways in London, by E. T. Cook
+
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