Chapter X: Part 10

There can be little doubt that the Restoration gave a marvellous incentive to club-life in London. On the one hand, the sour Puritans and fierce Independents, driven into holes and corners by the advent of Charles II., had other places of meeting than the conventicles where they offered their surreptitious worship; and at these stray places of re-union, they comforted and refected themselves in their own grim, uncomfortable fashion. On the other hand, the Cavaliers had their riotous assemblages, where they met to sing “Down among the dead men,” and drink their king’s health on their knees; the revival of humorous and theatrical literature filled the taverns and coffee-houses with wits and dramatists, instead of pedants and theologians; table companions formed into knots, and knots into throngs, and these at length formed themselves into clubs, where they could jest and criticise, argue and carouse, at their ease, without the fear of interlopers; and though, so late as the days of Foote and Chatterton, a stranger of good address and brilliant conversation could form a rallying coffee-house acquaintance with the most famous wits of the town, it was difficult for him to be admitted into their inner circle; even as, in our own time, a man may find plenty of conversation in a railway carriage or an hotel coffee-room, at a German Spa or a charity dinner, but must not feel surprised if his voluble acquaintance of the previous evening cut him dead the next time he meets him. The change of succession at the Revolution gave an impetus both to the establishment and to the exclusiveness of the clubs. While William, the Dutchman, held his uneasy, hooked-nose pre-eminence in this country, innumerable were the dim taverns in whose securest rooms stealthy clubs, with cabalistic names, were held; where, when the club-room doors were tightly closed, Captain Henchman, late of Roper’s horse, turned out to be Father Slyboots, high up in the order of Jesus, where sympathy was openly avowed for Sir John Fenwick, and the exiles of St. Germains were yet spoken of as the possessors of the Crown; and where, after William’s death, the health of “the little gentleman in black velvet,” meaning the molehill over which, according to the Jacobites, the king’s horse had stumbled, when William fell and dislocated his collar-bone, was enthusiastically drunk. It would have been hard, too, if the days of Queen Anne—the Augustan era in which Swift, Gay, Pope, Addison, Prior, Bolingbroke, Somers, and Dorset, held their glorious sway of intellect—had not been fruitful in the production of clubs; and it is to the first quarter of the eighteenth century that we may trace the birth of our most famous clubs. The accession of George the First, embittering as it did a new question of the succession to the throne, gave a fresh lease of popularity to the Jacobite clubs, which had languished somewhat during the reign of Anne, for sheer want of something to conspire about. They were held all over London: in taverns and mug-houses, in the purlieus of Westminster and the Mint in Southwark, and in the multitudinous courts and alleys about Cornhill and the Exchange. How I should like to have seen one of these old honest, wrong-headed Jacobite club meetings! There was our old friend Captain Henchman, _alias_ Father Slyboots, grown gray in conspiring; always in active correspondence with Rome and St. Germains, Douai and St. Omer, and, as of yore, fiercely hunted by Mr. Secretary’s messengers, from his Majesty’s Cockpit, at Whitehall. There were old Roman Catholic baronets and squires, from Lancashire and Cheshire, who would as soon have thought of surrendering their ancestral faith in the false and fickle Stuarts, as of abandoning their old shields of arms and trees of descent; there were hot-headed young counsellers from the Temple; and otherwise steady-going Jacobite mercers, and goldsmiths, and vintners, whose loyalty to the dethroned house had somewhat of a commercial tinge in it, as you see now radical hatters and grocers proud to blazon the Royal arms above their doors, and the Lord Chamberlain’s warrant in their windows, as “purveyors, by appointment, to her most Gracious Majesty.” The landlord was a staunch Jacobite, of course; how, indeed, should he be otherwise? His grandfather had fought at Naseby field; and his father had furnished one of King Charles the Second’s madams with clove-gillyflower water, and had never been paid for it. The drawer was Jacobite to the backbone (he turned traitor afterwards, it is true; was the means of hanging half the club, and retired with a handsome competence to the plantations, where he was exceedingly prosperous in the export of tobacco and the import of kidnapped children, and died elder and deacon)—but who but he brought in the great China bowl filled with a clear fluid, across which the company drank, with clasped hands, the toast of “The king over the water.” Ah, days of furious party and faction differences, but of self-sacrificing honour and loyalty, ye shall return no more! It was lucky for the Jacobite club-men when their convivialities were not interrupted by the irruption through the window of a party of the Foot Guards, who had climbed over the adjoining tiles. Traitors were always in their camp: spies always watching them. The English ambassador in Paris knew of their goings on, and revealed their bacchanalian machinations to wary Mr. Secretary at the Cockpit; and every now and then would come a tide of evil days, and the venue of the club would be changed; Father Slyboots would go into closer hiding, baffling pursuit as a verger of Westminster Abbey, compounding with skippers of smuggling luggers for conveyance to Dunkirk or Fecamp, crouching in the “priest’s hole” of some old Roman Catholic mansion of the North country, or indeed, good man, as the times were very bad, purchasing a stout horse and betaking himself to the road with Captain Macheath and Cornet O’Gibbet, and Duvalising travellers,—of course confining himself to those who were of the Hanoverian way of thinking. Not the first honest man who has turned highwayman: besides, was it not for the greater glory of Church and King? When the club had its next meeting, it might be in ’16 or in ’46 (for the century was quite gray-headed before the Jacobite clubs quite died out), there would be a lamentable hiatus here and there in the list of members. Where was Sir William Flowerdeluce?—Shot at Sheriffmuir. Where Colonel Belmain?—Hanged at Carlisle. Where young Christopher Layer, the barrister, gallant, devoted, enthusiastic?—His head was rotting on a spike, over Temple Bar, within sight of his old chambers. Where Jemmy Dawson, the pride, the pet, the pearl of the Jacobites, the dashing swordsman of Townley’s ill-fated Manchester Regiment?—Go ask the judge and jury, go ask the hangman, go ask the veiled lady in the black coach, who follows the fatal hurdle to Kennington Common, and sits out the hideous drama, and when she sees the heart of him she loves cast into the flames, and his fair limbs dismembered by the executioner, swoons and dies.

I have been reading a little old book, bearing the date of 1725, which professes to give a “Complete Account” of the principal clubs of London and Westminster. Its authorship is anonymous; yet I think I can discern traces of a certain fine Roman hand, well-known to me, in its composition, and I don’t think I am in error in ascribing it to Mr. Ned Ward, the scurrilous though amusing author of the “London Spy.” Its contents must be taken, of course, _cum grano salis_, with the other lucubrations of that diverting vagabond; yet I am ready to believe that many of his clubs were then existent. Some of them, indeed, have come down to our own times. According to the writer of the “Complete Account,” there was the “Virtuous Club,” established as a succursal to the Royal Society (which, indeed, was little more than a club at its commencement), at the Golden Fleece, a tavern in Cornhill, whence they moved to the Three Tuns, in Southwark: a queer locality, indeed, for the white-neckclothed savants, who now have their habitat in Burlington House. The chronicler treats them somewhat contemptuously, as collectors of “pickled maggots and mummies’ toenails,” and seems considerably to prefer the “Surly Club,” held at some out-of-the-way place near Billingsgate Dock, whose members had “a stoker to attend their fire”—I did not know the appellation “stoker” was so old—a skinker to ignify their pipes, and a chalk accountant to keep a trencher register of the club reckoning, lest the landlord below should be tempted to augment the scot by means of a double-notched chalk. The principal feature of the “Surly Club” appeared to lie in the members being all surly, ill-tempered, wrangling chuffs, who were bound to abuse each other and the world generally, at their every time of meeting. I believe that there are London clubs, not yet extinct, which carry out the principles of the “Surly Club” in a remarkably undeviating manner. Then there was the “Split-Farthing Club,” instituted by a society of usurers and money-spinners, who met together in the dark, in order to avoid the expense of candle or lamp-light, and of which the Hopkins immortalised by Pope was a distinguished member. The “Ugly Club” (which yet flourishes, I believe,) owed its foundation to a superlatively ugly fellow by the name of Hatchet (whence the term “hatchet-faced”), who had a nose of such immense size, that he was one day in the street charged by a butcher-boy with overturning a tray full of meat, when his head was at least a foot distant therefrom. A violent attempt was made to break up the “Ugly Club” by a committee of spinsters, who made unheard-of attempts to marry the members _en masse_, but in vain. Jack Wilkes was elected perpetual president of the “Ugly Club,” early in the reign of George III., and Honorè Gabriel Riquetti, Count de Mirabeau, who had some slight connection with the first French Revolution, was unanimously chosen an honorary member on his visit to England. I must not forget to mention the “Unfortunate Club,” held at the sign of the “Tumbledown Dick,” in the Mint. To have been at least once bankrupt (a fraudulent failure was preferred), or to have come in some way in collision with the laws of the country, was a _sine quâ non_ in the qualification for a member of the “Unfortunates.” The Market Women’s, or “Flat-cap Club,” was at one time quite a fashionable place of meeting, being frequented by many of the wild gallants from the Rose, and Tom King’s coffee-house, who treated the lady company to burnt brandy and flowing “Winchesters” (_i. e._, Winchester measures) of “powerful three thread”—our modern porter. Then there was the “Lying Club,” among whose voluminous rules were these, that the chairman was to wear a blue cap and a red feather, and that if any member, in the course of an evening, told a lie more impudent and egregious than he, the chairman, could manage to cap, he was at once to vacate the chair in favour of the superior Mendax. There was a very stringent rule, inflicting a severe fine upon any member who should presume, between the hours of nine and eleven of the clock, to tell one word of truth, unless, indeed, he prefaced it with the rider of “By your leave, Sir Harry”—Sir Harry Gulliver being the name of the original chairman of the club. There was the “No-Nose Club,” the “Beggars’ Club,” the “Thieves’ Club,” and the “Northern or Yorkshire Tyke’s Club;” and, to sum up, there was a horrific assembly, founded in the reign of Charles II., and called the “Man-killing Club.” The members of this savage corporation were debased Life-guardsmen, broken-down bullies, and old scarified prize-fighters. The prime qualification for membership was the commission of homicide. The “Mohocks,” “Scourers,” and “Sweaters” of Queen Anne’s time, were, as may readily be imagined, highly prominent members of this murderous fraternity, which might have flourished much longer but for the interference of the Sheriff’s hangman in ordinary, who disposed of the members with such amazing despatch and persistence, that the club could not at last form a quorum, and was so dissolved.

The “Irish Fortune-hunters’ Club” I am somewhat chary of recognising, for I am afraid that it existed only in the lively fancy of Mr. Ned Ward or his imitator. There is, indeed, a copy of some resolutions of the club appended to the “Complete Account,” but I am inclined to consider them apocryphal. Leave, by these resolutions, is given to Captain Donahoo to change his name to Talbot Howard Somerset; Captain Macgarret is empowered to change the place of his nativity from Connemara to Cornwall; and Lieutenant Dunshunner is presented with a suit of laced camlet at the club expense, in order to his successfully prosecuting his suit with Miss Bridget Tallboys, “with ten thousand pounds fortune; in the event of which happy consummation, he is to repay the price of the suit with interest, and moreover to release from his captivity at the Gate-house the club secretary, therein confined on suspicion of debt.”

Very different is the bran-new modern club whose interior my faithful artist has depicted, and whose appearance at five o’clock in the afternoon I am now called upon to describe. Gentlemen members of clubs, these gorgeous palaces are but the growth of one generation. Your fathers had, it is true, their Wattier’s, the Cocoa-Tree, White’s, and Boodle’s, but those were considerably more like gambling-houses than clubs. To obtain admission was exceedingly difficult, and to remain a member was, save to men of immense fortune, absolutely ruinous. Hundreds of the superior middle-classes, nay, even of the aristocracy, who would consider themselves social Pariahs now-a-days, if they did not belong to one or more clubs, were perfectly content, a score of years since, to frequent the coffee-rooms of hotels and taverns. A modern London club is the very looking-glass of the time; of the gay, glittering, polished, improved utilitarian, material age. Nothing more can be done for a palace than the fitters-up of a modern club have done for it. The march of upholstering intellect is there in its entirety. It must be almost bewildering to the modest half-pay captain or the raw young ensign, to the country gentleman, the book-worm fellow of his college, or the son of the country squire, fresh from dog-breaking and superintending the drains on his father’s estate, to find themselves suddenly transferred from the quiet lodgings in St. Alban’s Place, the whitewashed barrack-room, the ivy-grown parsonage, the tranquil oak-sporting rooms of “Keys” or “Maudlin,” the dull comfort of the country mansion-house, to this great hectoring palace, of which he is the twelve-hundreth part proprietor, and where he may live on the fatness of the land, and like a lord of the creation, for twenty guineas entrance fee, and a subscription of ten guineas a year. He has a joint-stock proprietorship in all this splendour; in the lofty halls and vestibules; in the library, coffee-rooms, newspaper and card-rooms; in the secretary’s office in the basement, and in the urbane secretary himself; in the kitchen, fitted with every means and appliance, every refinement of culinary splendour, and from whence are supplied to him at cost prices dishes that would make Lucullus wild with envy, and that are cooked for him, besides, by the great _chef_ from Paris, Monsieur Nini Casserole, who has a piano and a picture-gallery in the kitchen—belongs, himself, to a club, little less aristocratic than his masters’, and writes his bills of fare upon laced-edged note-paper. From the gorgeous footmen in plush and silk-covered calves, which the flunkeys of duchesses could scarcely rival, to the little foot-page in buttons; from the letter-racks to the French-polished peg on which he hangs his hat in the hall; from the books in the library to the silver spoons in the plate-basket; from the encaustic mosaic on the pavement of the hall to the topmost turreted chimney-pot—he has a vested interest in all. He cannot waste, he cannot alienate, it is true; he can but enjoy. Debentures have taken care of that; yet the fee-simple is in part his; he is the possessor of an entailed estate; yet, for all purposes of present enjoyment, he sits under his own roof on his own ground, and eats his own mutton off his own plate, with his own knife and fork. Oh! the wonderful workings of debentures, and the inestimable benefits they confer on genteel persons with expensive tastes and small incomes! Do you know that a man may drink wines at his club, such as, were he to order them at an hotel, the head waiter would hold up his hands at the extravagance of the order, or else imagine that he had Rothschild or Mr. Roupell dining in No. 4 box; nay, might perchance run round to the chambermaid to ask how much luggage the gentleman had. Rare ports, “worn-out ports,” grown colourless from age and strength, that cannot be looked at without winking—wondrous bitter Sherries—strange yellow Rhine wines, that gurgle in the glass when poured out—Claret that has made bankrupt the proprietors of the _vignobles_ who grew them, or else sent them mad to think their stock was out—indescribable Cognacs—Maraschinos and Curaçoas that filtrate like rich oil: all these are stored by special wine-merchants in the cellars of the club. The chief butler himself, a prince among the winepots, goes forth jauntily to crack sales, and purchases, standing, the collections of cunning amateurs in wines. You shall smoke such cigars at a club as would make Senor Cabana himself wonder where they were purchased. Everything is of the best, and everything is cheap; only the terms are, as the cheap tailors say, “for ready money.” Tick is the exception, not the rule, at a club; though there have been Irish members who have run goodly scores in their time with the cook and the waiter.

A man may, if he be so minded, make his club his home; living and lounging luxuriously, and grazing to his heart’s content on the abundant club-house literature, and enjoying the conversation of club friends. Soap and towels, combs and hair-brushes, are provided in the lavatories; and there are even some clubs that have bed-rooms in their upper storeys, for the use of members. In those that are deficient in such sleeping accommodation, it is only necessary to have a tooth-brush and an attic in an adjacent bye-street; all the rest can be provided at the club. Thus it is that, in the present generation, has been created a type peculiar thereunto—the club-man. He is all of the club, and clubby. He is full of club matters, club gossip. He dabbles in club intrigues, belongs to certain club cliques, and takes part in club quarrels. No dinners are so good to him as the club dinners; he can read no journals but those he finds in the club news-paper-room; he writes his letters on the club paper, pops them into club envelopes, seals them with the club seal, and despatches them, if they are not intended for postage, by the club messengers. He is rather sorry that there is no club uniform. He would like, when he dies, to be buried in a club coffin, in the club cemetery, and to be followed to the grave by the club, with members of the committee as pall-bearers. As it is, when he has shuffled off this mortal coil, his name appears on a board among the list of “members deceased.” That is his epitaph, his hatchment, his _oraison funêbre_.

The great complaint against clubs is, that they tend towards the germination of selfishness, exclusiveness, and isolation; that they are productive of neglect of home duties in married men, and of irrevocable celibacy in bachelors. Reserving my own private opinion on this knotty point, I may say that it is a subject for sincere congratulation that there are no ladies’ clubs. We have been threatened with them sometimes, but they have always been nipped in the bud. It is curious to see how fiercely this tolerant, liberal, large-headed creature, Man, has waged war against the slightest attempt to establish a club on the part of the gentler sex. From the Parisian malecontents of the first revolution, who broke into the lady assemblies of the _Jacobines_ and _Tricoteuses_, and broke up the clubs in question by the very expeditious process of turning the fair members into the street, after subjecting them to a castigation whose use is ordinarily confined to the nursery; from those ungallant anti-clubbists (they all belonged to clubs themselves, you may be sure) to Mr. Mark Lemon, who, in a _petite comédie_, brought the guns of satire to bear with terrible effect on an incipient agitation for lady clubbism, such institutions, on the part of the ladies, have always been put down, either by violence or by ridicule. The Tyrant Man is even, I am informed, disposed to look with jealousy on the “committees of ladies” which exist in connection with some deserving charities, and on the “Dorcas societies” and “sewing circles” of provincial towns; and all meetings to advocate the rights of woman, he utterly abhors.

I daresay that you would very much like to know the name of the particular club, the tableau of which adorns this sheet, and would feel obliged if I would point out the portraits of individual members: you would be very much pleased to be told whether it is the Carlton, the Reform, the Travellers’, the Athenæum, the Union, the United Service Senior or Junior, the Guards, the Oriental, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Parthenon, the Erectheum, the Wyndham, Whyte’s, Boodle’s, or the Army and Navy. No, Fatima; no, Sister Anne. You shall not be told. Clubbism is a great mystery, and its adepts must be cautious how they explain its shibboleth to the outer barbarians. Men have been expelled from clubs ere now for talking or writing about another member’s whiskers, about the cut of his coat, and the manner in which he eats asparagus. I have no desire for such club-ostracism; for though, Heaven help me, I am not of Pall Mall or St. James’s, I, too, have a club whose institutes I revere. “_Non me tua fervida terrent, dicta, Ferox_:” I fear not Jawkins, nor all the Borekins in Borekindom; but “_Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis_:” I fear the awful committee that, with a dread complacency, can unclub a man for a few idle words inadvertently spoken, and blast his social position for an act of harmless indiscretion.

Clubs, after all, are rather pleasant institutions than otherwise, yet they have not escaped the lash of the moralist. Turning over, as I dismiss the subject, the leaves of my little old book, I come on the following passage: “Though the Promotion of Trade, and the Benefits that arise from Conversation, are the Specious Pretences that every Club or Society are apt to assign as a Reasonable Plea for their Unprofitable Meetings, yet more Considerate Men have found by Experience that the End thereof is a Promiscuous Encouragement of Vice, Faction, and Folly, and the Unnecessary Expense of that Time and Money which might much better be Employed in their own Business, or spent with much more Comfort in their Several Families.” I don’t say what the ladies’ verdict will be on this opinion, though I can divine it; but I take off my hat to the moralist, capital letters and all, and, leaving him to grumble, will be off to the club.

Stay, stay, _siste viator_: I have an appointment. When have I not? I begin to think that I am the Wandering Jew, and there is decidedly no rest for the soles of my feet. Still the cry is “onward.” Wherever that club of mine may be situated, it is clear that I must bend my course towards Bow Street, Covent Garden.

And why to Bow Street, an’t please you? To gaze upon the resuscitated glories of the Royal Italian Opera? To dine at Nokes’s succulent restaurant, where erst was the “Garrick’s Head?” To obtain an order for admission to the workhouse from the relieving officer of the Strand Union Office? To hire theatrical costumes at Mr. May’s? or to bail a friend out of the station-house? Not so. And yet my business has something to do with the metropolitan police. I wish to witness the departure of the PRISONERS’ VAN.

About five p.m. the ladies and gentlemen who, through the arbitration of Mr. Hall, Mr. Jardine, or Mr. Henry, stipendiary magistrates, have settled their little differences with Justice, are conveyed to those suburban residences, in which, for the benefit of their health, and in the interests of society, it is judged necessary, _par qui de droit_, they shall for a stated term abide. The vehicle which bears them to their temporary seclusion enjoys different names; some technical, others simply humorous. By some it is called “Her Majesty’s Carriage,” from the fact that the crown and the initials “V. R.” are painted on the panels. More far-fetched wags call it “Long Tom’s Coffin.” The police and the reporters, for shortness, call it “The Van.” In this vehicle the malefactors who have in the course of the day been arraigned before the tribunal of the Bow Street Police-court, are conveyed to the various jails and houses of correction in and about the metropolis, there to undergo the several terms of imprisonment and hard labour, as the case may be, to which they have been sentenced. Sometimes the court sits late, and the van does not take its departure before half-past five; but five is the ordinary time when the great black, shining, cellular omnibus, drawn by two strong horses, with its policeman driver, and policeman conductor in a snug little watch-box, rolls away from Bow Street. It is a prison on wheels, a peripatetic penitentiary, a locomotive hulk. Criminals both in and out of prison regard it with a species of terror, not unmixed with admiration, and, as is their wont, they have celebrated it in that peculiar strain of ballad poetry for which London roguery has been so long distinguished. In that celebrated collection of dishonest epics, the “Drury Lane Garland,” in fit companionship with “Sam Hall,” “County Jail,” “Seven years I got for priggin’,” and the “Leary Man,” I find a ballad on the subject of the Bow Street chariot of disgrace, of which the refrain is—

“Sing Wentilator, separate cell,
Its long, and dark, and hot as well.
Sing locked-up doors—git out if you can,
_There’s a crusher outside the prisoners’ wan!_”

A “crusher,” or policeman, there is indeed, not only in the little watch-box on the exterior, to which I have alluded, but in the narrow corridor between the cells into which the carriage is divided in the interior. It is the former functionary’s duty to keep the outer door securely locked; the latter to take care that no communication takes place between the passengers confined in this penal omnibus, either through the ventilators on the roof, or by talismanic tappings at the panels which divide them.

When the hour of departure arrives, you see the pavement and carriage-way of Bow Street studded with a choice assemblage of the raggedry, ruffianry, felonry, misery, drunkardry, and drabbery, whom the infamous hundred of Drury, and the scarcely less infamous tithing of Covent, have cast out into a thoroughfare which, two hours hence, will be re-echoing to the wheels of carriages bearing noble lords and ladies to listen to the delicious Bosio (alas!) in the “Traviata,” or the enchanting notes of Tamberlik in “Otello.” London is full of violent contrasts; but this is the grimmest in the whole strange catalogue. See, the warder in the watch-box has descended from his perch, and with a patent key opened the portal of the van, revealing a second janitor inside. And now the passengers destined for the lugubrious journey come tumbling out of the court door, and down the steps towards the van. Some handcuffed, some with their arms folded, or their hands thrust in their pockets in sullen defiance; some hiding their faces in their grimy palms for very shame. There are women as well as men, starved sempstresses, and brazen courtezans in tawdry finery. There are wicked graybeards, and children on whose angel faces the devil has already set his indelible brand. There are ragged losels rejoicing to go to jail as to a place where they shall at least have bread to eat and a bed to lie on; there are dashing pickpockets in shiny hats and pegtop trousers braided down the seams. There are some going to prison for the first, and some for the fiftieth time. One by one they are thrust rather than handed into the van. The shabby crowd gives a faint, derisive cheer, the door bangs, the policeman-conductor ensconces himself in his watch-box, and the Prisoners’ Van drives off.

The Pharisee thanked Heaven that he was not “as that Publican.” Down on your knees, well-nurtured, well-instructed youth, and thank Heaven for the parents and friends, for the pastors and masters, to whose unremitting care and tenderness, from your cradle upwards, you owe it that you are not like one of these miserable Publicans just gone away in the prisoners’ van. But thank Heaven humbly, not pharisaically. A change at nurse, the death of a parent—one out of the fifty thousand accidents that beset life—might have thrown you into the sink of misery and want, foulness and crime, in which these creatures were reared, and you might have been here to-day, not gazing on the spectacle with a complacent pity, but trundled with manacles on your wrists into this moving pest-house, whose half-way house is the jail, and whose bourne is the gallows.

SIX P.M.—A CHARITY DINNER, AND THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE.

Some years ago, at the cozy little dining club held in my friend Madame Basque’s back-parlour, in the Rue de la Michodière, and the city of Paris, I had the advantage of the friendship of one of the most intelligent and humorous of the American gentlemen. There is such a personage—the vulgar, drawling, swearing, black-satin-vested, stove-pipe-hatted, whittling, smoking, expectorating, and dram-drinking Yankee loafers, who infest the Continent, notwithstanding; and a very excellent sample of the accomplished and unpretending gentleman was the American in question. He had paid a visit to England, in which country his sojourn had been of about three months’ duration; but he frankly confessed to me that having come purposely unprovided with those usually tiresome and worthless figments, letters of introduction—the very Dead-Sea apples of hospitality, goodly on the exterior, and all dust and ashes within—he had not, with the exception of his banker, who asked him to dinner once as a courteous acknowledgment of the ponderosity of his letter of credit, possessed one single acquaintance, male or female, during his stay in the metropolis of the world. I asked him whether he had not felt very lonely and miserable, and sufficiently inclined, at the end of the first week, to cast himself over any given bridge into the river Thames. Not in the slightest degree, he replied. I politely hinted that perhaps, as an American, he possessed the genial facility, common to his countrymen, of making himself at home wheresoever he went, and of forming agreeable travelling acquaintances, occasionally ripening into fast friends, by the simple process of saying “Fine day, stranger.” Not at all, he replied. He kept himself to himself, and indeed he was of a disposition, save in casual moments of unbending, quite surprising for its saturnine taciturnity. At all events, I urged, he could not have amused himself much by prowling about the streets, sleeping at hotels, dining in coffee-rooms, frequenting theatres and singing-rooms, and wandering in and out of museums; but I was wrong again, he said. He had seldom been so jolly in his life. I began to think either that he was quizzing me—“gumming” is the proper Transatlantic colloquialism, I think—or else that he was the Happy Man described in the Eastern apologue. But then, the Happy Man had, as it turned out, no shirt; and my American was remarkable for displaying a vast amount of fine linen, both at breast and wristbands, profusely decorated with studs, chains, and sleeve-buttons. How was it, then, I asked, giving the enigma up in sheer bewilderment. “Wall,” answered my friend with his own peculiar dry chuckle, “I used to ride about all day on the tops of the omnibuses; and very fine institutions for seeing life in a philosophical spirit, those omnibuses of yours are, sir.” He said Sir—not “Sirree,” as Anglo-Americans are ordinarily assumed to pronounce that title of courtesy. I understood him at once; saw through him; had done the same thing myself; and admired his penetrative and observant aptitude.

Never ride inside an omnibus—I apostrophise, of course, the men folks; for till arrangements are made (and why should they _not_ be made?) for hoisting ladies in an easy-chair to the breezy roof—they can manage such things on board a man-of-war—the vehicular ascent is incommodious, not to say indecorous, for the fair sex. But Ho, ye men, don’t ride inside. A friend of mine had once his tibia fractured by the diagonal brass rod that crosses the door; the door itself being violently slammed to, as is the usual custom, by the conductor. Another of my acquaintance was pitched head foremost from the interior, on the mockingly fallacious cry of “all right” being given—was thrown on his head, and killed. Inside an omnibus you are subjected to innumerable vexations and annoyances. Sticks or parasols are poked in your chest and in the back of your neck, as a polite reminder that somebody wants to get out, and that you must seize the conductor by the skirt of his coat, or pinch him in the calf of the leg, as an equally polite request for him to stop; you are half suffocated by the steam of damp umbrellas; your toes are crushed to atoms as the passengers alight or ascend; you are very probably the next neighbour to persons suffering under vexatious ailments, such as asthma, simple cold in the head, or St. Vitus’s dance; it is ten to one but that you suffer under the plague of babies; and, five days out of the seven, you will have a pickpocket, male or female, for a fellow-passenger. The rumbling, the jumbling, the jolting, and the concussions—the lurking ague in the straw when it is wet, and the peculiar omnibus fleas that lurk in it when it is dry, make the interior of one of these vehicles a place of terror and discomfort; whereas outside all is peace. You have room for your legs; you have the fresh air; you have the lively if not improving conversation of the driver and the conductor, and especially of the right-hand box-seat, who is invariably in some way mysteriously connected with dogs and horses, and a great authority thereupon. Finally, you have the inestimable advantage of surveying the world in its workings as you pass along: of being your own Asmodeus, and unroofing London in a ride from the White Horse Cellar to Hammersmith Gate. The things I have seen from the top of an omnibus!—more markedly in the narrow streets through which, from the main thoroughfare being blocked up by the incessant paving, lighting, sewerage, or electric telegraph communications of underground London, one is compelled to pass. Now a married couple enjoying an animated wrangle in a first-floor front; now a servant-maid entertaining a policeman, or a Life Guardsman, with a heart’s devotion and cold shoulder of mutton, in a far-down area; now a demure maiden lacing her virgin bodice before a cracked triangle of a looking-glass, at an attic window; now lords and ladies walking with parasols and lapdogs, and children in the private gardens of noble mansions, screened from the inquisitive pedestrians by sullen brick walls; now domestics hanging out the clothes in back-yards (seen over the roofs of one-storey houses), malicious birds of prey waiting, doubtless, round the corner for the fell purpose of pecking off their noses, while the astute King is in his counting-house on the second floor counting out his money, and the Queen, with the true gentleness of womanhood, is in the front kitchen, eating bread and honey in confident security, recking little of the four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, or of the song of sixpence—or rather of five shillings—which I am this day singing about them all, in consideration of an adequate pocketful of rye. So shall you look down and see those things; but chiefly shall you enjoy delectation and gather experience from the sight of the men and women who are continually passing beneath you in carriages and in cabs; yea, and in carts and barrows. Varied life, troubled life, busy, restless, chameleon life. The philosopher may learn much by reading the tradesmen’s names over the shop-fronts, which—he will never read them as he passes along the pavement—will give him quite a new insight into nomenclature. But only let him consider the carriages and the cabs, and he may learn wisdom in the ways of mankind in every rood of ground he traverses.

Sweethearting in cabs and carriages; passionate appeals for mercy; men brawling and fighting; lunatics being borne away to captivity; felons, shackled and manacled to the chin, being taken to jail, and perhaps to death, by stern policemen and jailers; frantic women kneeling on carriage-floors, women with dishevelled hair, streaming eyes, clasped hands raised to a Heaven which is never deaf but is sometimes stern, a weeping child clinging to their disordered dress, and money and jewels cast carelessly on the carriage cushions; gamblers carding and dicing; knaves drugging fools; debtors in the charge of sheriff’s officers; roysterers gone in drink; the “fatal accident” on its way to the hospital, lying all bruised and bloody across the policeman’s knee; the octogenarian in his last paralytic fit, and the mother suckling her first infant. All these dramas on four wheels may be seen by him on the top of the omnibus, who may, if of a caustic turn, rub his hands, and cry, “Aha! little do you reck that a chiel is above you taking notes, and, faith, that he’ll print them!”

You see, there are some elements of sadness, nay, of deep and terrible tragedy, in these vehicular panoramas—the unconscious show-vans; but at Six o’Clock in the Evening the cabs and carriages on which you look down offer, mostly, a far pleasanter spectacle. They are full of people going out to dinner. Some in broughams, coupés, double-bodied carriages, and the occupants of these are ladies and gentlemen, attired in the full panoply of evening costume, and whom, at the first blush, you might take for members of the highest aristocracy. But they are not so. They simply belong to the first-class genteel circles, the very superior middle ranks; the dwellers in Lower Belgravia—Brompton, Kensington, and Pimlico; or in Lesser Tyburnia—Bayswater and Notting Hill. They have all the airs and graces, all the allurements, of the titled and the exclusive; but they have not the genuine Hall-mark of nobility and fashion; they are but Britannia metal, electro-gilt in a very superior manner. The undeniable Patricians, the satraps of our modern Persian splendour, do not dine (would not supper be a more appropriate term?) till half-past seven, or even eight, post meridian. They can have, I should imagine, but scant appetites for their dinner at that advanced period of the evening, unless, indeed, they partake of it in the ancient Roman manner, lolling on the _triclinium_, crowning themselves with flowers, and following, between the courses, the swinish examples of Apicius and Lucullus. Better, I take it, a mutton chop at the Cock, or the Cheshire Cheese, than these nasty Ancient Roman repasts. It is true our moderns stay their aristocratic stomachs early in the afternoon with a copious lunch of hot meats and generous wines; and they say that her blessed Majesty herself, like a good, sensible woman, makes her real dinner at two o’clock, with her little children, in the nursery, and takes but a mere bite and sup at the grand stall-fed feast of gold plate in the evening.

But there are plenty of good dinners going on at six o’clock in the evening, and plenty of good diners-out to attend them. Masters in Chancery, who are renowned judges of port-wine, dine at six. Six, for half-past, is the dinner-hour for East India Directors. Let us hope that their dinners will continue to be as good as of yore, though the new India Bill leaves them nothing to direct. Members of Parliament, during the session, dine whenever they can, and sometimes not at all; but on “no House” days, six o’clock—always taken with a reservation for the half-past, for “six o’clock sharp” is entirely gone out of fashion, save with Muswell Hill stock-brokers, Manchester Square proctors, Bedford Row solicitors, and people who live in Bloomsburia—is the great time for them to drop into their clubs, sneer over the evening papers, gnash their teeth because there may happen to be no leading articles eulogistic or abusive of them therein, and _prendre des informations_, as the French say (though why I could not just as well say it in English, save that the cook at the club is a Frenchman, puzzles me), about what there may be good for dinner. But I must not forget that I am on the top of an omnibus, looking down on the people in the broughams and the cabs. Admire that youthful exquisite, curled, and oiled, and scented into a sufficient semblance of the “Nineveh Bull,” with whom Mr. Tennyson was so angry in “Maud.” His glossy hair is faultlessly parted down the occiput and down the cranium behind. White as the fleece of Clarimunda’s sheep is his body linen. Stiff as the necks of the present generation is his collar. Black as Erebus is his evening suit. Shining like mirrors are the little varnished tips of his jean-boots. Severe as the late General Picton is the tie of his cravat. This _gracilis puer_ is going to dine in Thurlow Square, Brompton. That gold-rimmed lorgnon you see screwed into his face, to the damaging distortion of his muscles, will not be removed therefrom—nor during dinner, nor during wine-taking, nor during the evening party which will follow the dinner, nor during the “little music,” the dancing, the supper, the shawling, the departure, and the drive home to his chambers. He will eat in his eyeglass, and drink in his eyeglass, and flirt and polk in his eyeglass. I am almost persuaded that he will sleep in his eyeglass (I knew a married lady who used to sleep in her spectacles, which led to a divorce: _she_ alleged the cause to be systematic cruelty, but what will not an enraged woman say?); and I should not be in the least surprised if he were to die in his eyeglass, and be buried in his eyeglass, and if the epitaph on his gravestone were to be “_veluti in speculum_.”

Down and down again, glance from the omnibus summit, and see in that snug, circular-fronted brougham, a comfortable couple, trotting out to dinner in the Alpha Road, St. John’s Wood. Plenty of lobster sauce they will have with their salmon, I wager; twice of boiled chicken and white sauce they will not refuse, and oyster patties will they freely partake of. A jovial couple, rosy, chubby, middle-aged, childless, I opine, which makes them a _little_ too partial to table enjoyments. They should be well to do in the world, fond of giving merry, corpulent little dinners of their own, with carpet dances afterwards, and living, I will be bound (our omnibus is ubiquitous, remember) at Maida Hill, or Pine Apple Gate. There is another couple, stiff, starched, angular, acrimonious-looking. Husband with a stern, Lincoln’s Inn conveyancing face, and pilloried in starch, with white kid gloves much too large for him. Wife, with all manner of tags, and tags, and odds and ends of finery fluttering about her: one of those women who, if she had all the rich toilettes of all King Solomon’s wives on her, would never look well dressed. I shouldn’t like to dine where they are going. I know what the dinner will be like. Prim, pretentious, dismal, and eminently uncomfortable. There will be a saddle of mutton not sufficiently hung, the fish will be cold, the wines hot, and the carving-knives will be blunt. After dinner the men will talk dreary politics, redolent of stupid Retrogression, and the women will talk about physic and the hooping-cough. Yet another couple—husband and wife? A severe swell, with drooping moustaches of immense length, but which are half whiskers. Transparent deceit! A pretty lady—gauzy bonnet and artificial flowers, muslin jacket, skirts and flounces oozing out at the sides of the carriage; hair _à la_ Eugénie, and a Skye terrier with a pink ribbon. I know what _this_ means. Greenwich, seven o’clock dinner (they are rather late, by the way, but they pass us on London Bridge, and the coachman will drive rapidly), water souché, whitebait, brown bread and butter, and iced punch; cigar on balcony, and contemplation of the moon. Ride on, and be happy. Rejoice in your youth—and never mind the rest. It will come, O young man, whether you mind it or not.

Hallo! there he is. I thought so. With a red face, shaven to the superlative degree of shininess, with gills white and tremendous, with a noble white waistcoat, and from time to time nervously consulting his watch, lest he should be half a minute behind time with the spring soup, rides by in a swift Hansom, the old gentleman who is going to a Charity Dinner. Blessings on his benevolent, gastronomic old head, he never misses one. He is going as quick as double fare will convey him to the London Tavern. Quick! oh thou conductor, let me descend, for I must take a Hansom too, and follow my venerable friend to the London Tavern; and, by cock and pye, I will go dine there too.

I think my readers must be by this time sufficiently acquainted with the fact that I am endowed with a very nervous temperament. Indeed, were I to say that I start at my own shadow, that I do fear each bush an officer, that I am continually in terror of Sudden Death, that I would rather not go upstairs in the dark, and that (which is not at all incompatible with a nervous organisation) in circumstances of real moment, in imminent life-peril, in a storm, in a balloon, in a tumult, and in a pestilence, I am perfectly master of myself, and, with a complete Trust and Reliance, am quite contented and happy in my mind: when I state this, I don’t think I need blush to own that I am as mortally afraid now of the boys in the street as in the old days when they pelted me with sharp stones because I preferred going to school quietly instead of playing fly-the-garter in the gutter. I am afraid of my last schoolmaster (he is quite bankrupt and broken, and pays me visits to borrow small silver occasionally), and yet call him reverentially, “Sir.” I am afraid of ladies—not of the married ones, in whom I take great delight, talking Buchan’s “Medicine,” Acton’s “Cookery,” and Mrs. Ellis with them, very gravely, till they think me a harmless fogey, hopelessly celibate, but sensible; not of the innocent young girls, with their charming _naïveté_ and pretty sauciness; but of the “young ladies,” who are “out,” and play the piano, and sing Italian songs—of which, Lord bless them! they know no more than I do of crochet-work—and who fling themselves, their accomplishments, and their low-necked dresses, at men’s heads. I am afraid of policemen, lest in an evanescent fit of ill temper they should take me up, and with their facile notions of the obligations of an oath, swear that I was lurking about with intent to commit a felon; and, transcendentally, I am afraid of waiters. I watch them—him—the Waiter, with great awe and trembling. Does he know, I ask myself, as he fills my tumbler with iced champagne, that half-and-half is a liquid to which I am more accustomed? Does he know that, sumptuously as I dine to-day, I didn’t dine at all yesterday? Is he aware that Mr. Threadpaper is dunning me for that dress-coat with the watered-silk facings? Can he see under the table that the soles of my boots are no better than they should be? Is it within his cognizance that I have not come to the Albion, or the London Tavern, or the Freemasons’, as a guest, but simply to report the dinner for the “Morning Meteor?” Does he consider the shilling I give him as insufficient? Shilling! He has many more shillings than I have, I trow. He pulls four pounds in silver from his pocket to change one a crown-piece. To-day he is Charles or James; but to-morrow he will be the proprietor of a magnificent West-end restaurant, rivalling Messrs. Simpson and Dawes at the Divan, or Mr. Sawyer at the London. So I am respectful to the waiter, and fee him largely but fearfully; and, were it not that he might take me for a waiter in disguise, I would also call him “Sir.”

I no sooner arrive at the London Tavern, _pari passu_ with the old gentleman with the gills and the white neckcloth, than I feel myself delivered over to the thraldom of waiterdom. An urbane creature, who might pass for a Puseyite curate, were not the waitorial stigmata unmistakeably imprinted on him, meets me, and tells me in an oleaginous undertone, which is like clear turtle-soup, that the Anniversary Festival of the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs is on the second floor to the right. A second waiter meets me at the foot of the stair-case, and whispers discreetly behind the back of his hand, “Two storeys higher, sir.” A third waylays me benevolently on the first-floor landing, and mildly ravishes from me my hat and stick, in return for which he gives me a cheque much larger than my dinner ticket; which last is taken from me on the second floor by a beaming spirit, the bows of whose cravat are like wings, and who hands me to a Dread Presence—a stout, severe man with a gray head, who is in truth the head-waiter at this Anniversary Festival, and who with a solemn ceremony inducts me into the reception-room.

Here, in a somewhat faded, but intensely respectable-looking apartment, I find about fifty people I don’t know from Adam, and who are yet all brothers or uncles or cousins-german, at the least, of my rubicund white-waistcoated friend. And, to tell the truth, I don’t know him personally, though his face, from meeting him at innumerable festivals, is perfectly familiar to me. So are those of the other fifty strangers. I have heard all their names, and all about them; but one is not expected to remember these things at public dinners. You take wine with your next neighbour; sometimes converse with him about eating and drinking, the merits of the charity, the late political tergiversation of the chairman, the heat of the weather, the fine voice of Mr. Lockey, and the pretty face of Miss Ransford, and there an end. Your interlocutor may be to-morrow the lawyer who sues you, the author whose book you will slaughter in a review, the Commissioner of Insolvency who may send you back for eighteen months. To have met a man at a public dinner is about as valid a claim to the possession of his acquaintance, as to have met him in the Kursaal at Hombourg, or on the steps of the St. Nicholas Hotel at New York. After some twenty years of public dining together, it is not, I believe, considered a gross breach of etiquette to make the gentleman who has been so frequently your fellow _convive_ a very distant bow should you meet him in the street; but even this is thought to be a freedom by some rigid sticklers for decorum.