Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“‘I was in the House last summer,’ continued Sir John, ‘when Mr So-and-so questioned him about the foreign refugees. In such cases members do not put to a minister the straightforward question, Have you answered this or that note? but they make an introduction a yard long, ramble round and round the subject like cats round a plate of porridge, make a long rhetorical display before coming to the point. Mr So-and-so made a lengthy discourse—spoke until the sweat broke out upon his brow from sheer liberalism and sympathy with the refugees; at last he got to his question, Whether it was true that several Continental governments had demanded that the British Government should keep watch over the proceedings of the refugees in London? what governments those were? whether the Secretary of State for foreign affairs had replied to the demand? and whether he had any objection to lay before the House the correspondence concerning it? The question was not a very agreeable one to a minister in Lord Palmerston’s position. During the speech by which it was prefaced, he sat with his head bent forward and his legs crossed, pulling his hat down lower and lower upon his forehead, and frequently passing his handkerchief across his face. It seemed as if he perspired even more than his interrogator; he was evidently in the most painful embarrassment what to reply. Mr So-and-so made an end and sat down. The House was so silent that one could plainly distinguish the snoring of some drowsy members on the back benches; Palmerston slowly rose, and requested the speaker to repeat his question in plainer terms, it not having been put with sufficient clearness the first time. The fact was, it had been put so clearly and plainly that in the gallery we lost not a syllable. Oho! thought I, and many with me—something wrong here; the noble Lord wants to gain a few minutes to prepare his reply. Mr So-and-so probably thought the same thing. He got up with the air of a man who feels confident that he has found a sore place, and repeated his question in the following simplified form: “I beg to ask the Secretary of State for foreign affairs,” he said, “which are the foreign governments that have demanded of the British Cabinet that it should exercise _surveillance_ over the political refugees in London?” He paused. There was dead silence. Lord Palmerston rose with solemn slowness, took off his hat, cleared his throat, as if he were about to make a long speech, said very quickly, “Not one”—threw his hat upon his head and himself back upon his seat. You may imagine the stupefied countenance of the questioner, and the roar of laughter in the House. Do you suppose Lord Palmerston had not at once understood the question? He understood it perfectly; but his meditative attitude, his request for its repetition, his solemn uprising, his clearing of his throat, his very perspiration—all, everything was diplomatic roguery, intended to heighten the effect of the two carelessly-spoken monosyllables, “Not one.” His interrogator looked ridiculous enough, but Lord Palmerston had said nothing that could offend him. The minister had so far attained his object that for some time afterwards he was not plagued with questions about refugees. Such scenes do not bear telling; they must be witnessed. When Lord Palmerston pleases, the House laughs, and all laugh, and no man is hit so hard that he cannot laugh with the rest.’”

Proceeding from a foreign pen, this lively parliamentary sketch must be admitted to be wonderfully truthful. Mr Schlesinger was particularly struck, upon his visits to the House of Commons, by two things, and these were, the longwindedness of the orators, and their ungraceful gesticulation. An English orator, he says, seems to make up his mind beforehand to abstain from gestures, and does his best to put his hands in a place of safety. Some of the attitudes, which are the consequence of this desire, he justly describes as neither tasteful nor elegant. “One man thrusts his hands into his breeches’ pockets, another sticks them into his waistcoat armholes, some hide them inside their waistcoats, or under their coat tails, others take a Napoleonic attitude. Thus do they begin their speeches. But, as the Englishman is wont to linger no short time over the mere exordium of his harangue; as he is capable of talking much longer about nothing than is commonly supposed upon the Continent; as he has very good lungs; and as a large portion of the British public is apt to estimate a speech’s value by its length, it is quite conceivable that he cannot maintain, during the whole duration of his discourse, the posture he adopts at its commencement. Besides this, he may warm as he goes on, and, when this is the case, he displays the strangest action of his arms and of his whole body.” In this paragraph, Mr Schlesinger makes one grave mistake. With the exception of a very limited number of methodical old fogies—slaves to habit, and the curse of their clubs—who, having nothing else in the world to do, make it the business of their lives to read the debates from the first line to the last, we know of no class in the United Kingdom that would not heartily rejoice if members of Parliament would cultivate brevity of speech and early hours, as advantageous alike to their own health and to the business of the country. “What a capital speech; it took an hour and a half in delivery!” Such, according to Mr Schlesinger, is the form of praise often heard in England. He blunders here. People will certainly listen with pleasure for an hour and a half, or for thrice as long, if they have the chance, to the earnest and fiery eloquence of a Derby—to the graceful, lucid, and often witty discourse of a Palmerston—to the polished and scholarly periods of a Macaulay—to the incisive oratory of a Disraeli. They will even lend their attention to the somewhat drawling and monotonous, although business-like delivery of the Whig leader whom Mr Schlesinger has dubbed a great orator, because Lord John is supposed not to be one of those Englishmen whom his German admirer has declared to be capable of talking a long while about nothing at all. But Mr Schlesinger has taken a part for the whole, and imagines that English willingness to hear and read the long discourses of a few chosen and gifted men, extends itself to the lame prose of the first noodle who takes advantage of dinner-time to inflict himself upon a bare house, a yawning gallery, and reporters with closed note-books. Let him take the confession of members, public, and reporters, as to the feelings with which they listen to an infinitesimal economical calculation, or to a two hours’ blatter about Borneo, from Mr Hume; or to a monody on Poland, or eulogium of Kossuth, from the lips of that most wearisome of well-meaning men, Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart. He will find that in England the value of a speech is not—as Byron says that of a very different thing should be—“measured by its length.”

Probably the two things that foreigners, upon a visit to London, are most curious to see, are the Thames tunnel and Greenwich. Mr Schlesinger, Dr Keif, and Frolick—who seems an easy-going man-about-town sort of cockney, delighted to have the pretext of ciceronism to revisit all manner of queer haunts—take ship at London Bridge, their minds upon white bait intent. They find much to say upon the way, and are very pleasant and amusing. In the beginning Mr Schlesinger moralises upon the crowd of colliers, more precious, he maintains, to Britain than ever were gold-laden galleons to Spain. “Take from the British Isles their coals,” he says; “pour gold, silver, and diamonds, into the gloomy shafts; fill them with all the coins that have been coined, since the world’s commencement, by good and bad princes, and you will not replace the inflammable spark that lies dormant in the coal, and which creates vitality by its own exhaustion.” Then he turns his attention to his fellow-passengers by the steam-boat, and remarks that the difference of classes is not so strongly defined by costume in England as in France and Germany. He misses the linen frocks or blouses worn on the Continent by men of a class which, in England, is usually clad in broadcloth, though this be often ragged or threadbare. “In London,” he says, “if you see, early in the morning, a man hurrying along the street in a black coat, round hat, and white cravat, do not take him for a professor hastening to his college, or for an attaché to an embassy conveying important despatches to his chief. He probably has soap-box, strap, and razor in his pocket, or at best is shopman to some Regent Street haberdasher—he may be a waiter, a tailor, a shoemaker, or a boot-cleaner. Many an omnibus-driver sits white-cravated upon his lofty box, and drives his horses as gravely as a Methodist preacher leads his flock. Amongst Englishwomen, also, the difference of rank is not very easy to be inferred from their dress. Coloured silks, black velvet, and hats with botanical appurtenances, are worn by the maid as by her mistress.” This general uniformity of costume in England strikes most foreigners, and shocks many. Frenchmen, in particular, consider the use of old and second-hand clothes, common amongst the lower classes of our countrymen and countrywomen, as a sort of degrading barbarism. An amusingly impertinent French journalist, in a little book now before us, states his view of the matter in colours which are certainly vivid, but can hardly be called exaggerated. “The eternal black coat and white cravat!” he exclaims. “One might take the people for so many gentlemen of high degree, condescending, in their leisure moments, or from eccentric caprice, to weigh sugar and measure calico. Thus it was that I took the grocer, in whose house I lodge, for a gentleman, and, through stupid pride, dared not bargain for my apartment, for which I pay twice its value. The history of an English black coat would fill a volume, at once comic and philosophical. One must take it up at its birth, when it quits the premises of a fashionable tailor to grace the shoulders of Lord ——, who pays seven or eight guineas for it, on account of its inimitable cut. Thrown, a fortnight later, to the nobleman’s valet-de-chambre, it passes to the second-hand dandy, then from back to back, lengthened, shortened, always descending in the social scale, losing its buttons, gaining holes, and at last devolving to the poor devil who sweeps a crossing, over which prance the splendid horses of the lord who was its first possessor. Poor coat! Sold at last for three shillings; its fragments finally used to polish a table or cleanse a kitchen floor, until they are bought by the hundredweight and cast into the mill, to reappear in some new form. The fate of the coat is also that of the gown. The lady’s gown and hat begin their career in the drawing-room, and end it in the gutter. We foreigners are always shocked, on our first arrival in England, to see the servant-maids washing the door-steps in bonnets, which once were of velvet, and now are of nothing at all! One sometimes observes upon them certain vestiges which, plunged into Marsh’s apparatus and analysed by a skilful chemist, might be recognised as fragments of feathers, shreds of lace, or stalks of flowers. Does the cook who wears this cast-off covering, who wraps herself, to go to market, in a tattered shawl, on whose surface holes and stains vie for the mastery, imagine that she will be taken for her mistress going to buy her own butter and vegetables, as an agreeable change from the daily routine of park and opera? What strange vanity is it that peeps through these ragged garments? Why do these honest Englishmen prefer a gentleman’s old clothes to the clean blouse or warm strong jacket they might get for the same price?” There is considerable truth in these remarks, especially as regards men’s coats and women’s head-dress, although we do not believe, as does the Frenchman we have quoted, that the wearing of second-hand clothes proceeds, on the part at least of English _men_ of the lower classes, from a desire to ape their superiors. It is one of those habits one can hardly explain, which we may designate as _cosa de Inglaterra_, just as Spaniards define as _cosa de España_ any peculiar and eccentric usage of their country. We must submit the matter, one of these days, to our old friend and contributor, the author of the “Æsthetics of Dress.” Of one thing we are very sure, that no one possessing an eye—we will not say for the picturesque, but for what is neat, appropriate, and convenient—can travel on the Continent, without drawing between the everyday dress of the English lower orders and that of the corresponding classes in most foreign countries, comparisons highly unfavourable to the former. And this is the more surprising that, in most things, neatness is peculiarly an English characteristic. Witness the trim gardens, the whitewashed cottages, the well-swept courts of our villages, the vigorous application of brush, broom, and soap in the humblest dwellings of Britain. But a line must be drawn between the country and the towns. In the latter, the appearance of the lower classes is anything but well calculated to inspire foreigners with a high opinion of their regard to the external proprieties. We share our French friend’s horror of greasy, threadbare coats, and of bonnets requiring chemical decomposition to ascertain their primitive materials; and, were it possible, we would gladly see the former replaced by the coarse clean frock or jacket; the latter by the cheap coloured handkerchief or straw-hat, which looks so neat and becoming upon the heads of Continental peasant and servant-women. It is to be feared, however, that to agitate the change would be but a profitless crusade. The fault—and a fault we think it must be admitted to be—lies in the total absence of anything like a national costume. In all the more highly civilised European countries, this, however graceful, has been abandoned by the upper classes in favour of a conventional, and certainly, in most respects, a graceless dress. But in all those countries, except in England, that national costume has been either retained, to a certain extent, by the people, or exchanged for one more in harmony with their occupations—not discarded in favour of such absurdities as long-tailed coats and high-crowned beavers.

At the Thames Tunnel the two Germans and their companion pause, and Mr Schlesinger gives an account of its origin and progress, which will have novelty and interest even for many Londoners. On reaching Greenwich, the party admire the hospital—the finest architectural group of modern England, according to Mr Schlesinger, with whom, notwithstanding the florid pretensions of the new Houses of Parliament, we quite agree on this score. Greenwich is unquestionably the only royal palace England possesses worthy of the name. Windsor Castle ranks in a different category. “Take the most ingenious architect in the world,” says Mr Schlesinger, “bind his eyes, and bring him to the platform on which we now stand; then, removing the bandage, ask him the purpose of this magnificent pile. If he does not at once say that it is a king’s palace, he is either the most narrow-minded or the sharpest-witted mortal that ever drew the plan of a house. Who would suspect that all this splendour of columns and cupolas is devoted to the service of poor crippled old sailors? That it nevertheless is so, does honour to the founders and to the English nation.” And then Mr Schlesinger, who is a bit of a _frondeur_, and not very indulgent to his own country’s defects and failings, contrasts the thoughtful care, tender kindness, and splendid provision which England’s veterans find at Chelsea and Greenwich, with the deficiencies and discomforts of the analogous institution at Vienna, and with the absence of any at all at Berlin. Passing the Trafalgar, which he recommends to all “who are willing to pay more money for a good dinner than would keep an Irish family for a week,” he moralises his way through the Park—then full of holiday-makers, for it is Monday, and “the people indemnify themselves for the rigidity of English Sabbath-observance.” A dinner at Lovegrove’s, and speculations upon white bait, conclude a pleasant day and an amusing chapter.

Mr Tremplin is described as a little elderly gentleman, with hair curled in a very youthful fashion, rosy cheeks, and a forest of grey whisker which would make him look quite fierce, but for the expression of mingled good-humour and vanity that twinkles in his little black eyes. For twenty years he had been in the habit of paying an occasional week’s visit to Sir John, and upon each succeeding visit he found London more and more gloomy and unbearable. Nothing less than his affection for his old friends could have induced him to exchange his heavenly Paris for the fogs of Thames. When in England, however, he amiably concealed his dissatisfaction, ate and drank like an Englishman, laughed and joked with the ladies from morning till night, and wiped his eyes when he took his leave. Between him and Dr Keif vehement discussions were of frequent occurrence. Tremplin was inexhaustible in his laudation of France; and this the doctor could the less endure, that this adulator of Paris was himself a German by birth, although he had passed his life in the French capital, had made his little fortune in the Opera Passage, and, like most renegades, out-Heroding Herod, was infinitely more French than a native-born Frenchman. Had he been an undeniable Parisian, Dr Keif might perhaps, from courtesy, have spared his feelings; but the Austrian journalist had no consideration for the feelings of a Frenchman who had first seen the light at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, and he gave his sarcastic tongue full swing. At dinner, one day, at Sir John’s, we find them at it, hammer-and-tongs; Monsieur Tremplin holding up Paris as an example in all respects to the entire universe; Dr Keif, exasperated by this exorbitant claim, sneering bitterly at the pretension.

“‘It is inconceivable,’ cried the doctor, ‘that all the world beside does not sit idle, since Paris is there to think and work for it. What does one need for universal regeneration beyond the _Journal des Débats_, which signifies enlightenment—Mademoiselle Rachel, who represents the æsthetical education of mankind—and the _Chasseurs d’Afrique_ as the representatives of freedom? Even in the Paris _cancan_, immoral as it may seem, there is doubtless grace and decency enough to civilise half a world. Eh? What say you? And if France is found one morning in the guardhouse, it is merely because she has danced like mad the whole night through for the good of oppressed humanity, and her evil case is but a witty trick, suggested by the most profound ideas of emancipation; for, _enfin_, France can do whatever she wills to do. She undertakes, in broad daylight and before the eyes of all Europe, to lie down in the dirtiest gutter, and she succeeds. Woe to the benighted people who do not forthwith follow her example, who cannot see that a gutter in which France wallows must lead straight to salvation. The French are the most conceited and crazy people on the earth’s surface—a nation of witty fools, of genial ragamuffins, of old _gamins_ and revolutionary lacqueys, who can neither govern themselves nor be governed, for any length of time, by God’s grace; they consequently, after their fourth revolution and third republic, will seek safety at the feet of an Orleanist or Bourbon prince, whom they will replace, after a while, by some romantic hairdresser, dancing-master, or cook, elected by universal suffrage. For my part, I vote for Soyer: he has at least the merit of having established a good school of cookery at the Reform Club.’”

Whilst extracting this tirade of the incorrigible Keif’s, we have taken no notice of the frequent interruptions attempted by the unfortunate German-Frenchman. The doctor’s flowers of rhetoric were far from fragrant to the nostrils of Tremplin, and the vein of truth that ran through his discourse made its somewhat brutal and exaggerated form yet harder to bear. “The most audacious blasphemy,” says Mr Schlesinger, “shouted into the ear of an English bishop’s grandmother, might have an effect approaching to that which the compliments of the excited Keif had upon his neighbour’s nerves.” Purple and perspiring, and unable to get in a word, poor Tremplin received one rattling volley after another, vainly endeavouring to escape from the iron grip the doctor kept upon the topmost button of his coat. At last he was released, with a parting prod from Keif’s barbed tongue.

“‘Notwithstanding their deeply sunken condition,’ the doctor said, ‘it is undeniable that the French, like the Spaniards, Italians, and Irish, are still a witty, diverting, and highly interesting nation.’

“‘_Infiniment obligé!_’ screamed Tremplin, breaking from the doctor, making a low bow, and thrice repeating the words, ‘How said you? Di-vert-ing! _Infiniment obligé, Monsieur le Docteur!_ Your German modesty inspires you with charming compliments.’

“‘No compliment, Monsieur Tremplin,’ replied Keif: ‘merely my honest opinion.’

“The Frenchman cast an epigrammatical side-glance at the doctor, buttoned his coat to the chin, as if arming himself for an important decision, and exclaimed in a loud voice: ‘You are’—(A long pause ensued, during which all present rose in confusion from their seats.) ‘You are totally unacquainted with Paris!’

“‘And what then?’ said Dr Keif.

“‘That is enough, I need to know no more. _Enfin_....’ And with a shrug of the shoulders in which the doctor should have beheld his moral annihilation, Mr Tremplin turned his back upon his opponent.”

Some minutes elapsed before the agitation caused by this little scene completely subsided. In the embrasure of a window, the lady of the house poured balm into poor Tremplin’s wounds; Keif paced the room, his complexion green and yellow, visibly struggling with the consciousness that he had been too hard upon the poor little Frenchman—rather rudely vehement and sarcastic; Sir John alone remained at table, balancing a silver dessert-knife, and making a small speech, to which nobody listened, in praise of the admirable parliamentary order observed at English public dinners. “‘There, when did it occur to anybody, before the removal of the cloth, to speak on more serious subjects than the domestic virtues of turtle and turbot, the tenderness of the lamb and venison, the age and excellence of the wines, and the qualities of all those good things of the earth which are so exquisitely adapted to promote the harmonious intercourse of Whigs and Tories, High Churchmen and Dissenters, landlords and cotton lords? There is the great point. That is what foreigners will not learn. They do nothing at the right time and nothing thoroughly, therefore do they eat gall and brew poison.’” There may be more than one grain of truth in the baronet’s words, Mr Schlesinger opines, but he does not stay to discuss the subject. It was written that the evening should be one of scrutiny and controversy. The feud between Keif and Tremplin having been easily put an end to by Sir John’s good-humoured intervention, the conversation again became general. The doctor must go out at nine o’clock, he said; he had promised to accompany Frolick to the theatre, and in a stroll through the theatrical district of London. This brought up Tremplin—not, indeed, to renew wordy combat with the formidable antagonist by whom he had been so recently worsted, but to express his astonishment that anybody could go to a London theatre in the dead season. He had always understood that the only theatres to which _comme-il-faut_ people went in London were the Italian operas and the miniature French playhouse in St James’s, and these were then closed. It was true that the queen annually honoured the obscure English theatres with a few visits, but that was merely out of complaisance to English prejudices. The ladies protested against this depreciation of the English drama; but the Parisian, who had quite forgotten his late indignation and discomfiture, did but smile and politely persist—developing his notions on an infinite variety of subjects with that easy, urbane, superficial dogmatism which characterises the very numerous class of Frenchmen who combine unbounded admiration of their own nation and country with slight esteem for, and considerable ignorance of, all others.

“‘_Mesdames!_’ he exclaimed, ‘you have no idea of all that you forego by living in London. It is well for you that you have never been in Paris, or you would feel like Eve when banished from Paradise, to which she would so gladly have returned for a chat with the seductive serpent. _Pardieu_, Paris! There, everyday life is an enchanting drama; every drawing-room is a stage; every chamber has its wings; and every one, from the porter to the duke, has perfectly learned his part. The theatres that open at night do but display and illuminate, with a magical light, the day’s comedy. Your worthy English people can neither act nor judge of acting. An English actor is a creature as much out of nature as a Parisian quaker. Where do you find most passion for the art—here or with us? Paris has hardly half so many inhabitants as London, but has many more theatres, and they are always as full as your churches. The poorest artisan cannot exist without sunning himself in the radiance of the stage; and will live for two days of the week on bread and milk, in order to save a few _sous_ for the _Variétés_ or the _Funambules_ on Sunday evening. Show me the Englishman who will sacrifice a mouthful of his bloody roast-beef for the sake of a refined enjoyment. No, no;—you weave and spin, and steam and hammer, and eat and drink, with God knows how many horses’ power; but as to enjoying life, you do not understand it. Am I right, _Madame_?’”

The ladies looked at each other, but were not ready with an answer. Sir John shook his head as he sat in his arm-chair, and remarked that there were good grounds for the difference. The Frenchman would not admit their goodness, and launched into an energetic diatribe against the strictness of London Sabbath-observance. We take it for granted that, even if the personages introduced into Mr Schlesinger’s book are not imaginary, the conversations he gives are chiefly of his own composition, intended to display the different sides of the various questions discussed; and that a _juste milieu_ between the rather extreme views expressed by Keif and Tremplin, and occasionally by Sir John, may be adopted with tolerable certainty as the measure of the author’s own opinions. Of this last point we feel the more convinced, by the moderate and sensible manner in which Mr Schlesinger expresses himself when speaking in his own person. His delineation of the representatives of England, Germany, and France, and the manner in which he puts them through their parts, is really very spirited and clever. Without, of course, in the slightest degree coinciding in the levity and irreverence of the profane Parisian, we will give a further specimen of his views and notions concerning this country, its condition and institutions; views and notions which, allowing for the tinge (only a slight one) of humorous caricature thrown in by Mr Schlesinger, are, in our firm belief—we might almost say, to our certain knowledge—those of a great number of Monsieur Tremplin’s fellow-citizens. Having taken up the ball of conversation, the Frenchman ran on with it at a canter, curvetting and kicking up his heels with huge self-satisfaction, and highly pleased at having an opportunity of showing himself at once patriotic, eloquent, and gallant. He proceeded to explain the causes of the decline of the British drama.

“In the first place,” he said, “the performance of a play would desecrate the Sunday evening. The Sabbath must be ended as wearisomely as it is begun. If one speaks of this to an Englishman, he pulls a long face, and talks about the morality of the lower orders. How moral the English lower orders are! One sees that every Monday, when the drunken cases are brought up at the police offices. One man has bitten off a constable’s nose by way of a joke; another has knocked down his wife and danced upon her body; a third has cut open his better-half’s head with the poker. All morality and liquor; but, thank heaven, they have not been to the theatre—any more than to church. Don’t tell me, because you have more churches than there are days in the calendar, that your poor people go to them; there is no room for them. Your churches are for respectable citizens, with cash jingling in their pockets. Then again, there are thousands of quakers, methodists, and other fanatics, who consider it a deadly sin to visit a theatre even upon working days. And finally, you are all such smoky fireside people—so given to stick in your shells like snails—that it is a punishment to you to have to creep out of your houses; or else you have such a silly passion for green grass, that you go and live at the end of the world, where you need a carriage to bring you home from the theatre by daybreak. These terrible distances ruin the pocket, and cramp civilisation. Your much-be-praised Englishmen, doctor, have not got a monopoly of wisdom. But I pity them not. It is for the poor daughters of Albion that I feel sorry. Upon my honour, ladies, I should not grieve if Napoleon’s glorious dream were to be realised. Ha, ha! That would be a life! Fancy our _grande armée_ leaping one day upon the British shores. Before the sun is up the _braves_ are in the city, say _bonjour_, conquer, and are forthwith conquered—by the charms of the fair-haired Anglo-Saxons. Our soldiers ask nothing in the way of acknowledgment. Keep your bank, your religion, and your lord mayor. The sole glory desired by France is, to annihilate the dragon of English _ennui_. Hand in hand with the fair sex, the invincible army achieves that feat. On the first evening there is a great fraternity-ball at Vauxhall; the next morning appears a manifesto in the name of the liberating army, by which the erection of at least one French vaudeville theatre in every parish is decreed, as the sole reward of the victors; and in a few years, when these new institutions have taken firm root in the hearts of the English people, the heroic army returns to sunny France, promising to come back should you relapse into your puritanical hypochondria. The daughters of Albion stand upon their chalky cliffs, and wring their white hands in grief at their deliverers’ departure. What say you to this picture? Is it not chivalrous? Is it not replete with the most affecting disinterestedness? And do you doubt that it dwells in the hearts of thousands of Frenchmen?”

If Monsieur Tremplin here paused, it was for breath rather than for a reply. Certainly it was not for want of matter, for he quickly resumed his satirical commentary on English usages, rattling off a string of libels on the dress and carriage of Englishwomen, on English musical taste, &c. &c.—the whole for the special benefit of Keif, whom he had got into a corner, the ladies being now busy tea-making. In the heap of flippancy and exaggeration, a few sparkles of sense and truth are discernible; not all the Frenchman’s arrows fly wide of the mark. He laughs pitilessly at the medley of colours frequently seen in ladies’ dresses in England; talks of “a scarlet shawl over an apple-green gown with yellow flounces, and a cavalry hat with ostrich feathers” (the judicious assortment of colours is one of the great studies and occupations of a Parisian woman’s life), and is altogether abominably disrespectful and scandalous in his remarks upon the fair sex of Great Britain, although he speaks in raptures of the beauty of “the raw material”—the beautiful hair, form, complexion, and so forth. Presently he gets upon the opera, and the dress exacted as a condition of admission. “Dresscoats and black trousers—why not powder and bagwigs? It is written in the _Morning Post_ that seven delicate ladies, in the first row of boxes, once fell into picturesque fainting fits, because a foreigner with a coloured neckcloth had smuggled himself into the pit. Be it observed that he had paid his bright Victorias at the door like anybody else. Dress-coat is indispensable—black trousers ditto; but coat and trousers may be old, dirty, threadbare. It strikes one as strange, that, besides paying his money, he is to be tutored by the servants at a theatre-door.” Keif, listening with smiling indulgence to the petulant Frenchman, occasionally presumes to differ from him, or at least to modify his strictures on English tastes and usages. “One meets with very good musical connoisseurs in this country,” says the doctor; “but I confess that the British public’s digestive powers, in respect of music, often astonish me. John Bull sits out two symphonies by Beethoven, an overture of Weber’s, a couple of fugues by Bach, half-a-score of Mendelssohn’s songs, and half-a-dozen other airs and variations, and goes home and sleeps like a marmot. At the theatre he will take in a tragedy by Shakespeare, a three-act comedy from the French, a ballet, and a substantial London farce. All that does not spoil his stomach.” Tremplin was delighted to find the doctor falling into his line. “Yes,” he said, “nothing satisfies these people but quantity. The Englishman throws down his piece of gold and asks for a hundredweight of music”—and he urged the doctor to go to Paris. Sir John was the best creature in the world, but he was an original—an oddity. The doctor, upon the other hand, was a man of sense and observation; and before he had worn out a couple of pair of shoe-soles upon the asphalt of the boulevards, his eyes would be opened.

“_Pardieu!_ Paris!” cried the little man, getting very excited. “The whole civilised world dresses itself out in the cast-off clothes of Paris. What has Paris not? Do you wish religion? There are Lacordaire, Lamennais, and the _Univers_. Religion of all sorts. Are you a lover of philosophy? Go to Proudhon. For my part, to speak candidly, I care neither for philosophy nor religion; both are _mauvais genre_, and I should not mind if M. Proudhon were hung; but that does not prevent me, as a Frenchman, from being proud of him. In a word, you will convince yourself that the whole world beside is but a bad imitation of Paris. There you find heaven and the other place, order and freedom, the romance of orgies and the solitude of the cloister, all combined in the most beautiful harmony—in the most magnificent and elegant form. Of one thing especially”—and Tremplin laid his hand, with the earnestness of an apostle, upon the shoulder of the astounded Keif—“be well assured, and that is, that nowhere but in Paris can you learn to speak French. Impossible. You never catch the accent. England’s climate is the most dangerous of all for the pronunciation. I, an old Parisian, still am sensible of the pestilential influence the jargon here spoken has upon my tongue; and whenever I return to Paris from London, I feel ashamed before my own porter.”

The hour was come for Keif to bend his steps theatrewards. Sir John escorted him to the door, and apologised, by the way, for the provocation Tremplin had given him at dinner. It was some slighting remark about Germans—an intimated opinion that they would never be accessory to the combustion of the Thames—that had first roused the ire of Keif, and provoked his tremendous denunciation of Frenchmen as all that is frivolous, unstable, and contemptible.

“‘What can you expect from a Frenchman?’ said Sir John. ‘He is a harmless soul, but a great oddity; one might make money by exhibiting him in Piccadilly. When I first knew him I took some trouble with him, and tried to give him an idea of what England is; but, as the proverb says, you cannot argue a dog’s hind-leg straight. You will never catch _me_ arguing with him again.’”

Keif went his way, chuckling at the notion of this precious pair of mortals taxing each other with oddity, and totally unconscious that he himself was as great an oddity as either of them. It was long after midnight when he returned home. Everybody was gone to bed, the servant told him, except Sir John and Monsieur. He found them at their chamber-doors; with candles, burnt low, in their hands. The baronet had forgotten his resolution;—he was trying to argue the dog’s hind-leg straight. The pair were in the heat and fervour of a discussion, which had evidently been of long duration. Shakspeare and Frenchwomen were its rather strangely assorted subjects. The doctor caught a few sentences as he passed, wished the disputants good night, and turned into bed. Fully a quarter of an hour elapsed before they evacuated the lobby to follow his example. Keif laughed to himself.

“‘So,’ he said, ‘in Monsieur Tremplin’s eyes, Shakespeare is deficient in power; and Sir John denies that Frenchwomen are graceful! Was there ever such a pair of originals?’ And so saying, the third original went to sleep.”

We need hardly say that the ramble of Dr Keif (by whom we suspect Mr Schlesinger himself is meant) through the theatrical purlieus, furnished abundant materials for a chapter. It was Saturday—the very night to see the Drury district in its glory; for wages had been paid, and after twelve no liquor would be sold; so the fortunate recipients of cash were making the most of the short night. This chapter, like some others in the book, shows such a thorough familiarity with, and correct perception of, London low life—is so totally different, in short, from the blundering and exaggerated pictures one usually meets with in accounts of London by foreigners—that we are more than once tempted, whilst reading it, to suspect the writer of unacknowledged obligations to English authors. But Mr Schlesinger has, we have no doubt, been long resident in England, and as he, moreover, in one or two instances, indicates by a note his appropriation of English materials, we dismiss from our mind the idea of unconfessed plagiarism. Since we do so, we must not refuse him the praise to which his faithful and striking sketches fairly entitle him. With him and Frolick, we turn out of the Strand, through a narrow court, into Drury Lane.

“In the shops which occupy the ground floor of almost all the houses, are exposed for sale, at low prices, shabby female apparel, coarse eatables, low literature with horrible illustrations, strong shoes, old clothes, abominable cigars, cold and hot meat. But the most prominent feature in the whole of Drury Lane is the gin palace, whose favourite station is at corners, where the lane is intersected by cross streets. The gin palace contrasts with the adjacent buildings pretty much as does a Catholic church with the cottages of a Slavonian village. From afar it looms like a lighthouse to the thirsty working man; for it is sumptuous with plate glass and gilt cornices, and dazzling with a hundred many-coloured inscriptions. Here, in the window, is the portrait of a giant from Norfolk, who is employed in the house to draw liquor and customers; yonder, in green letters upon the pane, we read—‘The Only Genuine Brandy in London;’ or, in red letters—‘Here is sold the celebrated strengthening wholesome Gin, recommended by all the doctors’—‘Cream Gin’—‘Honey Gin’—‘Genuine Porter’—‘Rum that would knock down the Devil,’ &c. &c. Often the varnished door-posts are painted from top to bottom with suchlike spirited announcements. It is to be remarked, that even those gin shops which externally are the most brilliant, within are utterly comfortless. The landlord intrenches himself behind the bar, as in a fortress where his customers must not enter. The walls in this sanctuary are covered with a whole library of large and small casks, painted of various colours. The place thus partitioned off is sometimes a picture of cleanliness and comfort, and within it an arm-chair invites to repose; but in front of the bar, for the customers, there is nothing but a narrow dirty standing place, rendered yet more disagreeable by the continual opening and shutting of the doors, and where the only seat, if there be one at all, is afforded by an empty cask in a corner. Nevertheless the palace receives a constant succession of worthy guests, who, standing, reeling, crouching or lying, muttering, groaning or cursing, drink and—forget.

“On sober working days, and in tolerable weather, there is nothing remarkable, to the uninitiated, in the appearance of Drury Lane. Many a little German capital is worse lighted, and not so well paved. Misery is less plainly legible upon the physiognomy of this district than upon that of Spitalfields, St Giles’s, Saffron Hill, and other wretched corners of London. But at certain times it oozes, like Mississippi slime, out of every pore. On Saturday evenings, after working-hours, on the evening of holiday-Monday, and after church on Sunday, Drury Lane is seen in its glory. On the other hand, Sunday morning in Drury Lane is enough to give the most cheerful person the spleen. For the poorer classes of labourers the Lord’s day is a day of penance, without church to go to or walk to take. The well-dressed throngs that fill parks and churches scare smock-frock and fustian-jacket into the beer-shops. For the English proletarian is ashamed of his rags, and knows not how to drape himself with them picturesquely, like the Spanish or Italian lazzarone, who holds beggary to be an honourable calling. In the deepest misery, the Englishman has still pride enough to shun the society of those even half a grade superior to himself, and to confine himself to that of his equals, amongst whom he may freely raise his head. And then church and park have no charm for him. His legs are too weary for a walk into the country; boat, omnibus, and railway, are too dear. His church, his park, his club, his theatre, his refuge from the exhalations of the sewers above which he dwells and sleeps, are the gin palace.”

This is a gloomy, but we fear, to a certain extent, too true a picture. In every large city, and particularly in such an overgrown one as London, a certain-amount of misery of the kind above depicted must exist; there must be a certain number of human beings living in a state of almost total deprivation of those blessings which God intended all his creatures to share—of a pure air, of the sight of fields and flowers, of opportunities to praise His name in the society of their fellow-men. But we are pretty sure Mr Schlesinger has lived long enough in England to discern, and has candour enough to admit, that in no country in the world are such generous, energetic, and unceasing efforts made by the more fortunate classes for the moral and physical betterment of the unfortunates whose degraded condition he graphically and truly describes. That which in most European countries is left almost entirely to the charge of government, and which is consequently often left undone, or at best half done, is effected in England by the cordial co-operation of the government and the nation, aided by a press which must in justice be admitted to be ever ready to give publicity to social grievances, to the sufferings of particular classes, and to practical suggestions for their alleviation or remedy. Fortunate inhabitants of a favoured land, we must not allow the difference just pointed out to inflate our national vanity over-much. In no country is there so much private wealth as in England, and thus, when we seem to give much, we may be giving not more than others whose means are less, but their will as good. Then there is, undeniably, another, and we should perhaps say a selfish, motive for the energetic, efficient, and liberal manner in which the opulent and well-to-do classes of Englishmen take up and prosecute schemes for the amelioration of their poorer countrymen. An observant people, shrewd in deduction, and setting common sense above every other mental quality, we take warning by our neighbours. And we feel that the best safeguard for institutions we all revere and cherish—the best security against sedition and revolution, and against the propagation, by designing knaves and misguided enthusiasts, of that jacobinism whose manœuvres and excesses have proved so fatal in other lands—is a generous and humane consideration of the wants and sufferings of the poorer classes, and an earnest endeavour to elevate their condition.

And let us acknowledge, with thankfulness, that we have good stuff to work upon; that if the higher classes show themselves prompt in sacrifices, a praiseworthy patience is displayed by those they strive to succour. The Parisian artisan or day-labourer, although probably less of a bellygod than the Londoner of the same class, quickly gets irate when he finds bread dear and commons short; and, upon the first suggestion from any democrat who promises him a big loaf, is ready enough to “descend into the street,” tear up the pavement, build a barricade, and shoot his brother from behind it. Contrast this with the fortitude and long-suffering of the poor gin-and-beer-drinking people whom Mr Schlesinger qualifies (and the terms, perhaps, may not be justly gainsaid) as besotted and obtuse of sense. Grant that they be so; they yet have qualities which constitute them valuable citizens of a free country. They will toil, when work is to be had; they have an innate respect for law and order, and a manly pride which makes them shun a workhouse coat as an abject livery; they loathe the mendicancy in which the southern lazzarone luxuriates; they are not insensible to the benevolent efforts constantly making in their behalf; and they take little heed of the demagogue’s artful incitements.

“There is hardly any people,” muses Mr Schlesinger, in a very different part of his book and of London, (when strolling at the Hyde Park end of Piccadilly), “that loves a green tree and an open lawn so heartily as the English. They have not less reverence for the noble trees in their parks than had the Druids for the sacred oaks in their consecrated groves; and it does one’s heart good to see that the struggle with Nature, the striving to apply her powers to wool-carding and spindle-turning, does not destroy the feeling for those of her beauties which cannot be converted into capital and interest. The English nation refute, in their own persons, the oft-repeated lie that ‘excessive’ cultivation (civilisation) estranges men from their primitive childish feelings. In England, more than in any other part of the world, are fire and water, earth and air, made use of as bread-winners; in England, the ploughed field is fattened with manure gathered on barren reefs thousands of miles distant; in England, nature is forced to produce the enormous water-lilies of the tropics, and to ripen fruits of unnatural size; in England, one eats grapes from Oporto, oranges from Malta, peaches from Provence, pine-apples from Jamaica, bananas from St Domingo, and nuts from Brazil. That which the native soil produces only upon compulsion, and at great cost, is borrowed from other zones, but not on that account are his native trees and meadows, woods and shrubberies, less dear to the Englishman.”

Mr Schlesinger will not doubt that this love of rural scenes and nature’s beauties, which he so happily and gracefully discriminates and defines, is common to all classes of Englishmen. We believe that it is, and we recognise in it a propitious sign. The poor people he has seen, during his Sabbath rambles in London’s “back-slums,” losing sight of the blessed sunshine, and immuring themselves in a tap-room or gin palace, would perhaps, but for their ragged garments, weary limbs, and scantily furnished pockets, have preferred, like their betters, a country ramble, to the cheap and deleterious excitement provided for them by Booth and Barclay. But we feel that we are arguing without an opponent. We can only trust, and we do so trust, seriously and gladly, that the day will never come when the consciousness that the attainment of perfection is impossible will deter English legislators and philanthropists from devoting their utmost energies and abilities to the improvement of the meanest and most depraved classes of their fellow-countrymen.