Chapter XV: Part 15

It is the privilege of the unique Haymarket to be like its week-night self on Sunday; but in the six mundane days to be a totally different Haymarket from the street which it becomes immediately after midnight. True, by daylight, and during the early part of the evening, it is that which it will remain all night: a broad thoroughfare inclining slightly downhill northward; a theatre on its eastern, a colonnaded opera-house on its western side; a thoroughfare containing a sufficiency of shops for the sale of general merchandise, but, predominating above these, a crowd of hotels, _restaurants_, cigar-divans, coffee-houses, and establishments for the sale of lobsters, oysters, and pickled salmon, according to the seasons in which those dainties are considered most fit to be enjoyed. But it is not the same—no, not at all the same—Haymarket to which it will suddenly turn, when the clock of St. Martin’s church shall proclaim the hour of midnight. The change, at first imperceptible, is yet in a moment more immense. As though Harlequin had smitten the houses—and the people also—with his wand, the whole Haymarket wakes, lights, rises up with a roar, a rattle, and a shriek quite pantomimic, if not supernatural. The latter image would, I think, be the most _vrai semblant_. “Hey for fun!” “How are you to-morrow?” and “How are you?” are the cries and the pass-words. The painted Clown (in mosaic jewellery, and all-round collar, an astonishing cravat, and a variegated shirt) grins his grin and tumbles on the pavement. He is not above stealing an occasional sausage, bonneting a policeman, overturning an image-boy’s stock in trade, or throwing the contents of a fishwoman’s basket about. Harlequin in a mask and patchwork-suit is here, there, and everywhere, conjuring money out of people’s pockets, and perpetually pursued by a vindictive Sprite, habited in the garb of a police constable. The lean and slippered Pantaloon hobbles over the flags, and grimaces, with his wicked old countenance, beneath the gas-lamps. And Columbine, _Wallah billah!_ Columbine in muslins, spangles, and artificial flowers, is here, there, and everywhere, too, and dances her miserable jigs to the sorry music of the fife, viol, and tabor, squeaking, scraping, and thumping at the gin-shop by the corner of the court.

Midnight: the play is over, and the audience pour from the Haymarket Theatre. The aristocratic opera season is concluded by this time of the year, and the lovers of the drama have it all their own way. Crowds of jovial young clerks and spruce law students cluster beneath the portico, yet convulsed by the humours of Mr. Buckstone. Happy families of rosy children, radiant in lay-down collars, white skirts and pink sashes, trot from the entrance to the dress-circle under the wing of benevolent papa and stout good-humoured mamma, with a white burnous, and a tremendous fan; their healthy countenances all beaming and mantling with smiles, and joyously recalling the jokes of that funny old man in the farce, or expatiating on the glories of the concluding _tableau_, with its tinsel and gold leaf, its caryatides of ballet girls, and its red and blue fire, in Mr. Talfourd’s last sparkling burlesque. Happy, happy days and frame of mind, when the theatre can give such delights as these. Isn’t it better to sit amazed and delighted in the front row of the dress-circle, or on the third row of the pit, roaring at the stalest Joe Millerisms, and clapping the hands at the tomfool feats of tumbling, than to lie _perdu_ in a private-box, now scowling, and now sneering, like Stricknine, the great theatrical critic, who will go and sup afterwards at the Albion, on an underdone mutton-chop, and, calling for pen, ink, and paper, slaughter the inoffensive burlesque mercilessly. Stricknine can’t write burlesques himself. He can’t write books; he can only slaughter, and must have been apprenticed in his youth to Bannister or Slater. And, slaughterer as he is, he is not equal to the manly business of knocking down a bullock with a pole-axe. Give him a long keen knife, and he will puncture the neck of a lamb, and that is all.

Ethelred Guffoon (who has been to three theatres to-night) bustles out from his stall with his lorgnette in its shagreen case. Mr. Kickeroe, Q.C., comes from the pit, shouldering his umbrella. Kickeroe has been a constant visitor to the pit of the Haymarket any time these twenty years, though he could easily afford a private box once if not twice a week. His greatest extravagance is to purchase four upper-box tickets when Mr. Buckstone takes his benefit. He is an ardent admirer of the Haymarket five-act comedies; and people say that many of his most effective and jury-touching perorations have been drawn from the sentimental “tags” of the Haymarket dramatists. Trotting down the box-stairs, too, comes vivacious, learned, chatty, kindly, abusive Mr. Boblink, with his head prematurely white, but his heart as green as it was thirty years since. Mr. Boblink is generally beloved, though regarded with a humorous terror for his vituperative qualities. He expatiates on the necessity of breaking butterflies on the wheel, although, good man, he would not harm a particle of pollen on their wings. His fierce language is but the bellow of the blunderbuss: here is no bullet, not so much as a bit of old hat for wadding in his gun. He strikes with a wooden sword, and scourges malefactors with a knout whose lash is made of floss-silk. He wears the mask of a Gorgon horrible to see; but the mask is transparent as glass, and you may descry the honest genial face of the man wreathed with sly smiles behind it. So he goes through life—a _bourru bienfaisant_—hitting men sounding thwacks with a bladder full of peas, and recording sentence of literary death against culprits, knowing full well that the sentence will never be carried out. To hear Boblink talk, you would think him the most malevolent creature breathing. He is so different from smooth, quiet, smiling Mr. Stricknine, (_he_ only scowls when he is alone) who presses your hand warmly, and immediately betakes himself to the Albion, there to make a neat _fricassée_ of your reputation, and, in the most polished and classical language, insinuate that you are a hopeless fool with dishonest propensities. And yet Mr. Boblink has a deadly armoury of his own at home, and knows the _tierce_ and the _carte_ and the “_raison démonstrative_,” and has, when exasperated, proved himself so cunning of fence, that I would see him hanged before I would fight with him in earnest.

Supper is now the great cry, and the abundant eating and drinking resources of the Haymarket are forthwith called into requisition. Bless us all! there must be something very dusty and exhaustive in the British drama to make this Haymarket audience so clamorous for supper. By the ravenous hunger and thirst displayed by the late patrons of the theatre, you would imagine that they had gone without dinner for a week. You may sup in the Haymarket as your taste would lead, or as the state of your finances would counsel—if people followed such counsel—you to sup. You may cut your coat according to your cloth. Are you rich—there is Dubourg’s, the Hôtel de Paris, and the upstairs department of the Café de l’Europe. There is no lack of cunning cooks there, I warrant, to send you up pheasants and partridges _en papillotte_; _filets_, with mushrooms or truffles, culinary gewgaws that shall cost five shillings the dish. Yea, and cellarers will not be wanting to convey to you the Roederer’s Champagne, the fragrant Clos Vougeot, the refreshing Lafitte, and the enlivening Chambertin with yellow seal; smooth waiters to attend to your minutest wishes, and bring you the handsome reckoning on an electro-silver plateau, and, with many bows, return you what odd change there may be out of a five-pound note. I do not say that the Haymarket contains such gorgeous supper-houses as the Maison Dorée, the Café de Paris, the Café Anglais, or Vachette’s; but I have seen some notable _parties fines_ within its precincts. The Haymarket never was virtuous; so there is never any question about the cakes and ale, and the ginger that is hot in the mouth, to be found therein.

If still your taste leads you towards French cookery—though you wince somewhat at the idea of claret, Burgundy, and Champagne to follow—there exists a second-class French _restaurant_ or two where succulent suppers may be obtained at moderate prices. If unpretending chops, steaks, kidneys, sausages, or Welsh rabbit, washed down by the homely British brown stout, and followed perchance by the soothing cigar, and the jorum of hot anything-and-water: if such be your ambition, I should advise you not to sup in the Haymarket at all; but to wait till one o’clock and sup with me. I will show you the whereabouts. Such chops and steaks and _et ceteras_, you may indeed obtain in the neighbourhood, but I like them not. If your funds and your credit be very low, why, you can enter one of the taverns—if you can reach the bar for the crowd of Bacchanalians that are gathered before it, and sup on the quarter of a pork pie, a sausage roll, and a Banbury cake, washed down by a glass of pale ale; nay, if you be yet lower in pocket, and your available wealth be limited to the possession of the modest and retiring penny, you may, at the doors of most of the taverns, meet with an ancient dame, of unpretending appearance, bearing a flat basket lined with a fair white cloth. She for your penny will administer to you a brace of bones, covered with a soft white integument, which she will inform you are “trotters.” There is not much meat on them; but they are very toothsome and succulent. It is no business of yours to inquire whether these be sheep’s trotters or pigs’ trotters, or the trotters of corpulent rats or overgrown mice. They are trotters. Look not the gift-horse in the mouth; for the penny was perhaps a gift, however strictly you may have purchased the trotters. Eat them, and thank heaven, and go thy ways, and take a cooling drink at the nearest pump with an iron ladle chained to it, which is, if I am not mistaken, over-against St. James’s Church in Piccadilly. Or, perhaps you are fond of ham-sandwiches. The unpretending dame with the basket will straightway vend you two slices of a pale substance, resembling in taste and texture sawdust pressed into a concrete form, between which is spread a veneer of inorganic matter, having apparently a strong affinity to salted logwood. This is ham! The concrete sawdust is bread! The whole is a sandwich! These luxuries are reckoned very nice by some persons, and quite strengthening.

Or, “another way,” as old Mrs. Glasse says in her cookery book. At the Coventry Street extremity of the Haymarket stands that celebrated and long-established institution known as the Royal Albert Potato Can. At that three-legged emporium of smoking vegetables, gleaming with block tin painted red, and brazen ornaments, the humble pilgrim of the Haymarket may halt and sup for a penny. For a penny? What say I? for a halfpenny even, may the belated and impoverished traveller obtain a refreshment at once warm, farinaceous, and nourishing. Garnish your potato, when the Khan of the Haymarket has taken him from his hot blanket-bed, and cut him in two—garnish him with salt and pepper, eschew not those condiments, they are harmless, nay, stimulating; but ho! my son, beware of the butter! it is confusion. Better a dry potato and a contented mind, than dreadful Irish salt grease—for butter I dare not call it, which may give you a bilious attack that will last for a month.

I should like to know what has been the use of my recommending these various grades of supper to you, from the lordly Café de l’Europe to the humble Potato Can, when I should have known all along, and as it were intuitively, that your mind was bent upon oysters, and that oysters after the play you were determined to have. Come along, then, a’ goodness’ name, and if oysters are to be the order of the night, e’en let us have them.

The London oyster, or rather shell and cured fish shop, for the sale of lobsters, crabs, pickled and kippered salmon, bloaters, and dried sprats, is combined with that of the delicious molluscs of which so many thousands are nightly consumed; the London oyster-shop, and particularly the Haymarket one, stands, and is a thing apart, among the notabilia of this metropolis. You know how the French eat oysters. There is the _belle écaillère_, generally a hideous old woman of about sixty, with a snuffy-looking pocket-handkerchief twisted round her head, who sits at the _restaurant_ door amid a grove of oyster-shells and hanks of straw, and, in the intervals of oyster-opening, darns worsted stockings. The nimble _garçons_ come skipping from the gilded saloons of the _restaurant_ within, and demand their required dozens and half-dozens from the _écaillère_ without. The bearded frequenters of the _restaurant_ evidently think it an epicurean and fashionable thing to commence, or rather precede dinner, by swallowing so many oysters. There are enterprising _bon vivants_ who will even go so far as their two dozen: but I dissent from them, for three reasons: The first, that, in my opinion, oysters should be eaten either alone—of themselves, by themselves, or for themselves—or that they should be consumed full twenty minutes before the repast; for the second, that all French oysters, whether of Ostend, Maremnes, or Canale, are to me utterly abominable, having—even when they are fresh, which is seldom—a certain coppery flavour, superlatively nauseous; for the third, that in the best French _restaurants_, it is difficult, if not impossible, to procure Cayenne pepper; and, without that rubicund condiment, I would give no more for the best “natives” than for a plate of cold boiled veal without salt. The _écaillère_ element is the only one prevalent in France relative to the sale of oysters, and the consumers pick them off the shells with little silver pitchforks, squeeze lemon over them, and eat them daintily in many mouthfuls. Fie upon such miminy-piminy ways! Oyster-shops the French don’t seem to understand at all. At Chevet’s, that vast comestible shop in the Palais Royal, they keep oysters, and lobsters, and prawns, and shrimps—keep them as a show in the windows for a week or two, when, their novelty beginning to wear off, they are disposed of, I presume, to the nobility and gentry. They tell a story of a Frenchman, who hoarded up his money, in order to purchase _un homard magnifique_, which he had seen at Chevet’s, and to which he had taken a fancy.

Americans tell me that though the oyster attains high perfection, and is held in culinary reverence as high, in the States, anything resembling our Haymarket oyster-shop is not to be found in New York. But on Broadway Pavement, during the gay night, brilliant lamps, sometimes coloured in fantastic devices, invite you to enter underground temples of oyster-eating. These are called oyster-cellars. Some are low and disreputable enough, and not impassible to imputations of gouging, bowie-kniving, and knuckle-dusting; but others are really magnificent suites of apartments, decorated with mirrors and chandeliers, and glowing with gilding, mahogany, and crimson velvet; and here you may consume oysters as small as periwinkles or as large as cheese-plates—oysters of strange and wondrous flavours—oysters with _bizarre_ and well-nigh unpronounceable names—oysters cooked in ways the most marvellous and multifarious: stewed, broiled, fried, scolloped, barbacued, toasted, grilled, and made hot in silver chafing dishes like the delicious preparation known as “despatch lobster.” You wash down suppers in oyster-cellars such as these with Hock and Champagne; yet for all the splendour and the rarity of the cooking, and the variety of oysters, I will abide by the Haymarket oyster-shop, rude, simple, primitive as it is, with its peaceful concourse of customers taking perpendicular refreshment at the counter, plying the unpretending pepper-castor, and the vinegar-cruet with the perforated cork, calling cheerfully for crusty bread and pats of butter; and, tossing off foaming pints of brownest stout, (pale ale—save in bottles, and of the friskiest description—is, with oysters, a mistake) contentedly wipe their hands on the jack-towel on its roller afterwards.

* * * * *

As in this real life of ours, Old Age and Infancy often meet on neutral ground, and the prattle of the child goes forth with hand out-stretched to meet the graybeard’s maundering: so, oh reader, do I find the beginning and the end of these papers drawing closer and closer together. Ere many hours they will meet; and their conjunction shall be the signal for their decay. You will remember how, when the day was very young, the morning scarce swaddled, and kicking in his cradle with encrimsoned heels (Aurora, the nurse, had chafed them), we visited a great newspaper office, and saw the publication of the monster journal. Now, when midnight itself is fallen into the sere and yellow, we stand once more within the precincts of journalism. This is not, however, the monster journal that has all Printing House Square to roar and rattle in. No: our office is in the Strand. We are free of the charmed domains. We pass up a narrow court running by the side of the office, push aside a heavy door, ascend the creaking staircase, and discreetly tapping at a door, this time covered with green baize, find ourselves in the presence of Mr. Limberly, the sub-editor of the “Daily Wagon.”

Let us cast a glance round the room. What a litter it is in, to be sure! what piles of newspapers, home and country ones, mangled and disembowelled by the relentless scissors, cumber the floor! More newspapers on shelves—old files, these—more on the table; letters opened and unopened, wet proof-sheets, files of “copy,” books for review, just sent by the publishers, or returned by the reviewers, after they have duly demolished the contents and the authors. And all about the room are great splashes and dried-up pools of ink, and the ceiling is darkened with the smoke of innumerable candles—gas was, until very lately, considered anything but orthodox in a newspaper office, and many sub-editors still find its sharp, harsh, flickering, though brilliant light, far inferior to the honest, though evil-smelling, old tallow-candles, in their tin sconces and japanned shades. The “Daily Wagon,” be it understood, is a newspaper of the good old Conservative way of thinking—no Liberal notions, or humbug of that sort: Church and State, strict constitutional and social discipline (including game-laws, religious disabilities, church-rates, unequal taxation, rural justices’ justice, and flogging in the army and schools)—the True Blue British line of politics, in fact. Thus situated, the “Wagon,” one of whose proprietors is said to be a peer, another a bishop, and a third a brewer—nothing could be more respectable—sticks to its old office, its old rooms, and its old staff. The two former have not been painted within the memory of man; though it must be admitted that the latter wash quite as frequently as the _employés_ of the “Morning Cracker,” with its bran-new offices, its bran-new furniture, its bran-new type, paper, machines, writers—bran-new everything but ideas. The “Daily Wagoners” affect to sneer at the “Morning Cracker,” which, in its turn, laughs the “Wagon” to scorn; but both combine in abusing the monster journal of Printing House Square. “Wagoner” and “Cracker” are both high-priced journals. So, of course, they both feel bound to ignore even the existence of a journal called the “Daily Bombshell,” which somehow manages to keep up a better staff of writers, and a larger establishment, to give fresher news, more accurate intelligence, more interesting correspondence, and reflections on public events incomparably more powerful, than its high-priced contemporaries, all for the small sum of one penny. The “Wagon” and the “Cracker” are in a chronic state of rage at the “Bombshell,” though they pretend to ignore its existence; but one day the bishop who is interested in the “Wagon,” hearing that the circulation of the abhorred “Bombshell” exceeded fifty thousand, while that of his own beloved journal fluctuated between five and seven hundred, drove down in almost delirious excitement to the offices of the “Wagon”—drove down in his own carriage, with his mitre on the panels—and suggested to Mr. Fitzfluke, the editor, that the price of the paper should forthwith come down to one penny. But Mr. Fitzfluke shook his head in respectful deprecation of the proposition, and summoned to his aid Mr. Limberly, who likewise shook his head, and whispered the magic word “advertisements.” A grand consultation between the proprietors took place next day, whereat the brewer came out in a rabidly conservative point of view, and declared, striking a leathern-covered table, that he would sooner see his own “Entire” retailed at a penny a pint, than submit to an imitation in price of the “rubbishing prints” of a set of “dam radicals.” So the “Daily Wagon” keeps up its price, and manages to crawl on in a tortoise-like manner, supported by its advertisements. It sleeps a good deal, and doesn’t want much to eat; and will bear being trodden on, stumbled over, nay, occasionally jumped upon, without seeming in the least to mind it.

Mr. Limberly sits, then, in his sub-editorial throne—an unpretending cane-bottomed arm-chair—surrounded by his _attachés_ and myrmidons, his good men and true. The electric telegraph messenger—a spruce lad in the not unbecoming uniform of that recently-formed corps—has just arrived, bearing a message which may announce either war in the East or Peace in China, either a fluctuation in the funds at St. Petersburg, or a murder at Haverfordwest; either the wreck of a steamer, with all hands lost, on the north-west coast of Ireland, or the arrival in the Mersey of a clipper ship from Australia, with a few score thousand ounces of gold in her treasure-room, to say nothing of the nuggets, the gold dust, and the bankers’ receipts in the pockets of her wide-awake-hatted passengers. But all is fish that comes to Mr. Limberly’s net. Leading article and literary criticism, theatrical notices and prices of railway and mining shares, advertisements and letters from eulogistic or indignant correspondents, telegrams and foreign tittle-tattle, fires, murders, fatal accidents, coroners’ inquests, enormous gooseberries, showers of frogs, the acceptances of the St. Leger, and the prices of hops in the Borough Market: he looks upon all these items but as so much “copy,” for which the master printer is waiting, and which are required to fill the ever-yawning columns of the “Daily Wagon.” Snipping and pasting, extracting, excising, revising, and correcting, Mr. Limberly will work late into the night and early into the morning; but he will not dream of retiring to rest till the paper itself be “put to bed,”—_i.e._, laid on the printing machine for the requisite number of copies to be struck off; and even then he will probably go and smoke a cigar at the “Crimson Hippopotamus,” in the Strand, hard by—the great house of call for morning journalists—before he hails his matutinal cab, the driver of which waits for him on the stand, and looks out for him quite as a regular customer, and rattles over Waterloo Bridge to his well-deserved bed.

ONE O’CLOCK A.M.—EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS, AND A FIRE.

In the bleak, timbery city of Copenhagen, so terribly maltreated at the commencement of the century by Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B.; in that anything-but-agreeable capital of Denmark, where raw turnips sliced in brandy form a favourite whet before dinner,—where they blacklead (apparently) the stairs in the houses, and three-fourths of every apartment are sacrificed to the preposterous exigencies of the Stove; where the churches are mostly of wood, and the streets are paved with a substance nearly resembling petrified kidney potatoes; in Copenhagen, then, I formed, some thirty months since, a transient acquaintance with an old gentleman in green spectacles. He was a Dane, formerly commercial, now retired from business. He came every day, and with unvarying regularity, to take his post-prandial coffee and _petit verre_ in the _speise saal_ of the hotel then afflicted with my custom: he generally indulged in the refreshment by dipping a large lump of sugar in the hot liquid, sucking it, replenishing it, occasionally replacing the lump, till the cup was emptied; and he snuffed eternally. These are not such peculiar characteristics of a foreign gentleman that I have any special cause to dwell upon them here; but as the hotel was very empty, and I was very dull, I made this old gentleman—as my incorrigible habit is—a study and a theme. I converted him into a mental clothes-prop, and hung an infinity of fantastic notions, theories, and speculations upon him. We soon became, thanks to the French language and constant proximity, tolerably good friends. Of course the old gentleman did not delay long in asking me why I had come to Copenhagen. _That_ question is invariably asked you—_ad nauseam_, too—throughout the North of Europe. They begin at Hamburg, continue at Berlin, return to it in Denmark and Sweden, and end at St. Petersburg. If a man be not a commercial traveller, or a diplomatist, a spy, or a negotiator of forged bank-notes, these Northern people seem utterly bewildered as to his object in coming to such latitudes. The Rhine, the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, the Holy Land, Switzerland, the Tyrol, good; but the North: _que diable!_ what does he want in that galley? I confess that I was somewhat at a loss to give a straightforward answer to the old gentleman in green spectacles. I might have told him that I had come to see the birthplace of Hans Christian Anderson; but then I was not quite certain as to whether that delightful Danish writer first drew breath in Copenhagen. It would have been equally disingenuous to have adduced a wish to see the famous Thorwaldsen’s Museum as the reason for my visit; for with shame I acknowledge that, having no guide-book with me, I had entirely forgotten that the Danish metropolis contained that triumph of plastic art. It is true that, by attentive study of the glorious museum, I subsequently atoned for my mnemonic shortcomings. So, being on the horns of a dilemma, I elected to tell the truth—not a bad plan under any circumstances—and said that I had come to Copenhagen for the simple reason that I did not know what to do with myself, and would have gone with equal alacrity to Nova Zembla or to Katamandu; which candid avowal placed me on a most confidential footing with the old gentleman in green spectacles, and materially assisted the progress of our intercourse.

Now, whatever can this Danish old gentleman and his verdant spectacles have to do with One o’Clock in the morning, and Evans’s Supper-rooms? You must have patience, and you shall hear. In subsequent chatty interviews, it came out that the old gentleman had once upon a time—a very long while ago, more than a quarter of a century—been in England. His reminiscences of our country were very dim and indistinct by this time. His knowledge of the English language, I take it, had not at any time been very extensive, and it was reduced now to a few phrases and interjections; some trifling oaths, a few facetious party-cries, current, I presume, at the time of his visit, and having, mainly, reference to Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill; these, with some odds and ends of tattered conversation, formed his philological stock in trade. But, even as “single-speech Hamilton” had his solitary oration, Mrs. Dubsy’s hen her one chick, and Major Panton his unique run of luck at the card-table, so my old gentleman had his one story which he persisted in delivering in English. It was a mysterious and almost incomprehensible legend; and began thus: “’Ackney Rod! Aha!” Then he would snuff and suck his lump of sugar, and I would look on wonderingly. Then he would explain matters a little. “’Ackney Rod. I live there so long time ago. Aha!” This would lead to a renewed series of snuffings and suckings, and he would proceed—“Vontleroy he not ’ang. He rich man, banquier in America. He ’ang in a sospender basket. Aha!” For the life of me, I could not for a long time understand the drift about “Vontleroy” and the “sospender basket;” but at length a light broke in upon me, and I began to comprehend that this wondrous legend related to Henry Fauntleroy, the banker, who was hanged at Newgate for forgery, and concerning whose apocryphal rescue from strangulation—by the means, according to some, of a silver tube in his windpipe, and, according to others, of an apparatus of wicker-work, which, suspending him from the waist, so took the strain off his neck—rumours were current at the time of his death and for a considerable period afterwards. This cock-and-bull story was well-nigh all the poor man could recollect about England, and he decidedly made the most of it.

And, after all, I have only introduced him as a species of gentleman-usher to another foreign acquaintance—with whom my intercourse was even more transient, for I met him but once in my life, and then had only about seven minutes’ conversation with him on the deck of a steamer—whose knowledge of English and recollection of England were even more limited. “Ver fine place,” he remarked, referring to my native land. “Moch night plaisir, London. Sing-song ver good. Ev’ns magnifique.” There, the secret of my digression is out now, and I land you—somewhat wearied with the journey, it may be—under the Piazza of Covent Garden Market.

Mr. Charles Dickens once declared in print that were he to start a horse for the Derby, he would call that horse Fortnum and Mason: the delightful hampers of edibles and drinkables vended by that eminent firm about the period of Epsom Races being connected with the most pleasurable of his impressions concerning that exciting sporting event. I have no doubt that my steamboat acquaintance was not by any means solitary in his enthusiastic estimate of the “magnifique” nature of Ev’ns, or EVANS’S, and its “sing-song;” and his opinion is, I have reason to believe, shared by many hundreds of English country gentlemen who patronise the Bedford, the Tavistock, the Hummums, and other kindred Covent Garden hotels, and who at Evans’s find their heartiest welcome and their most inexhaustible fund of amusement. Nor can I see myself, exactly, how this great town of ours could manage to get on without the time-honoured Cave of Harmony; for be it known to all men—at least to so many as do not know it already—Evans’s, though Captain Costigan is no longer permitted to sing his songs there, and even Colonel Newcome, were he to volunteer to oblige the company with a song, would be politely requested to desist by a waiter—is the “Cave,” and the “Cave” is Evans’s. It is not without a certain sly chuckle of gratulation that I record this fact. Those friends of mine who have adopted the highly honourable pursuit of hiding round corners in order to throw, with the greater security, jagged stones at me as I pass, those precious purists and immaculate precisians who cry hard upon a writer on London life in the nineteenth century, because he describes things and places which every man knows to exist, and whose existence he for one has not the hypocrisy to deny—these good gentlemen will scarcely be angry with their poor servant, Scriblerus, for giving a word-picture of a place of amusement which is immortalised in the first chapter of “The Newcomes.” And please to observe, gentlemen, that I am not about to venture on the very delicate ground with respect to the quality of the songs once sung at Evans’s, and so boldly trodden by Mr. Thackeray. I have the less need to do so, as that delicate or indelicate ground has long since—and to the honour of the present proprietor, Mr. Green—been ploughed up and sown with salt, and the musical programme rendered as innocuous as the bill of fare of a festival in a cathedral town.

And now for the place itself. About a century since, when the shadowy hero of the “Virginians” was beating the town with my Lords Castlewood and March, and Parson Sampson, and his black man Gumbo was flirting with Colonel Lambert’s servant-maids; about a century since, when in reality Johnson—not so long since emancipated from sleeping on bulks with that other homeless wretch, and man of genius, Savage—was painfully finishing his gigantic work, the “Dictionary;” when Goldsmith was “living in Axe Lane among the beggars,” or starving in Green Arbour Court; when honest Hogarth dwelt at the sign of the Golden Head, in Leicester Fields (he had set up his coach by this time, worthy man, was Serjeant-painter to the King, and had his country-house at Chiswick); when the wicked, witty Wilkes was carousing with other “choice spirits” as wicked and as witty as he, at Medmenham Abbey; when the furious Churchill was astonishing the town with his talent and his excesses; when Lawrence Sterne was yet fiddling, and painting, and preaching, while his friend Hall indited the “Crazy Tales;” when George II., hitherto considered as a heavy, morose German king, who did not like “boetry and bainting,” and could not see the fun of the “March to Finchley,” but now for the first time revealed to us by Mr. Carlyle as a dapper, consequential little coxcomb—the “_mein bruder der comödiant_,” “my brother the playactor” of Friedrich-Wilhelm, was Sovereign of Great Britain, by the grace of the Act of Settlement and the madness of the Stuarts—this town of London was full of choice holes and corners, known under the generic name of “night cellars.” You may see in Liverpool to this day—and I am told, also, in New York—some flourishing specimens of these inviting localities, but they have almost died out in London. The White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly is now a booking-office; the Shades in Leicester Square (underneath Saville House), once Pennant’s “pouting house for princes,” is a _restaurant_; the cellar of the Ship at Charing Cross is yet a tavern, but is used more as a waiting-room for passengers by the Kent Road and Deptford omnibuses; and a whole nest of cellars were swept away by the Adamses when the Adelphi Terrace, with a worse range of cellars beneath, as it afterwards turned out, was constructed. But the night cellars of a hundred years ago! What dens, what sinks, what roaring saturnalia of very town scoundrelism they must have been! We have but two reliable authorities extant as to their manners and appearance: Hogarth’s prints, and the pages of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. The former are the engraven testimony of a man to whose honest nature it was utterly abhorrent and intolerable to bear false witness; the latter is a record that _cannot lie_. I don’t mean by these Sessions Papers the collection of trials known as the “Newgate Calendar.” In these, crimes are dressed up with all manner of romantic and adventitious details, and occasionally spiced with moral reflections by the ordinary of Newgate. I mean the real Sessions Papers, the _verbatim_ reports of the trials—from murder to pot-stealing—taken officially in short-hand by the Gurneys and their predecessors, and which, in their matchless _extenso_, remain, to the inestimable advantage of our historians and our painters of manners. They date from the time of Judge Jeffreys, to the last session of the Central Criminal Court—it may have been the day before yesterday.

The cellars come out with a perfectly livid radiance in the reports of these trials. You see the “brimstone” woman, whom Hogarth pointed out to his friend and sketched upon his thumbnail, spurting brandy from her mouth at the enraged virago her companion. You see Kate Hackabout passing the stolen watch to Tom Idle, who is under the unseen surveillance of one of Justice de Veil or Harry Fielding’s runners, and the luckless Thomas will be laid by the heels by daybreak to-morrow. Kate will go to Bridewell, there to be whipped and to pick oakum. Foote’s Mother Cole is here, you may be sure; and Tom Rakewell, spending his last guineas among the gamblers and ruffians. Who else are there? Ferdinand Count Fathom, you may sure; poets and hack-writers—for Grub Street existed then in spirit and in truth—making my lord’s gold pieces, which he gave for that last foolishly-fulsome dedication, fly. Yes; Mr. Peregrine Pickle, and you are spending your night in the cellar. And Mr. Thomas Jones, fresh from the western counties,—you, too, are here, with a laced coat bought out of my Lady Bellaston’s last bank-note. Ah! Thomas! Thomas! if pure-minded Sophy Western could but see you in this bad place, among these ruffianly companions!—among horse-jockeys, highwaymen-captains, unfrocked parsons; deboshed adventurers, redolent of twopenny ordinaries and Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet; disbanded lieutenants of phantom regiments; scriveners struck off the rolls, ruined spendthrifts, Irish desperadoes enthusiastic for the Pretender and other men’s pence, bankrupt traders, French and Italian rascals flagrant from the galleys of foreign seaports, and all, according to their own showing, distressed patriots; German swindlers and card-sharpers, who declare themselves to be Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, Jew coin-clippers and diamond-slicers, riverside vagabonds in the pay of the commanders of press-gangs on the look-out for benighted journeymen, or dissolute lads who have run away from their apprenticeship or quarrelled with their parents, recruiting crimps for both sexes, usurers looking for prodigals who have yet money to lose, bailiffs’ followers looking for prodigals who have lost all and owe more; and, scattered among all this scum of frantic knavery and ragabosh, some gay young sprigs of aristocracy, some officers in the regiment of Guards, some noisy young country squires of the Western type. This, all garnished with dirt and spilt liquors, with the fumes of mum, Geneva, punch, wine, and tobacco smoke, with oaths and shrieks and horrid songs, with the clatter of glasses and tankards, the clash of rapiers and verberations of bludgeons—is the London night cellar of a hundred years ago. Round Covent Garden such places positively swarmed. The Strand, the neighbourhood of Exeter ’Change, Long Acre, and Drury Lane, reeked with dens of this description. For hereabouts were the playhouses, and in their purlieus, as in those of cathedrals, you must expect to find, and do find, in every age, the haunts of vice and dissipation. It may be profane to say _ubi apis ibi mel_: but such is the sorry fact.

I am to give you notice that this article was originally intended to be intensely topographical—nay, _sant soit peu_, antiquarian and archæological. It was my desire to give you a minute description of the hostelry called Evans’s Hotel, and whose basement contains the saloon known as Evans’s supper-room, from the earliest period of authentic research to the present time. How it emerged from a state of brawling night-cellarhood, to the dignity of a harmonic meeting; who first ordered “chops to follow,” and what ingenious spirit originally suggested the curious principle now in practice, of paying for your refreshment at the door on quitting the establishment; who instituted the glee-choir, introduced books of the words, and discovered that baked potatoes are necessarily associated with bumpers of stout, poached eggs, and liberally cayenned kidneys; who formed the gallery of portraits which now graces the walls of the ante-saloon, and who first dreamed of such an Arabian Night’s succedaneum as a ladies’ gallery. All these things it was my firm intention to record, in Roman type, for your amusement, if not your edification. “Who knows,” I asked myself enthusiastically, “if I take sweet counsel (hot and strong as well as sweet, sometimes) of Mr. Paddy Green, most urbane of nocturnal Bonifaces, and sit reverentially at the feet of Mr. Peter Cunningham, who, it is rumoured, in the matter of London localities, could, an he chose, rival the marvellous feat of memory ascribed to old Fuller of the ‘Worthies,’ who could repeat backwards, and without book, the names of all the tavern signs on both sides of the way from Temple Bar to Ludgate: who knows,” I repeated, “but that I shall be able to submit to the readers of ‘Twice Round the Clock,’ a copy of an unpaid score left by Oliver Goldsmith at some Evans’s of the past; or put it upon record that Sir Thomas Lawrence and Major Hanger had claret-cup together here, on the night that Thurtell was hanged, or that on the fatal evening when the Catholic Bill passed the Lords, a live bishop—a hackney coachman’s many-caped coat over his apron and shorts—descended Evans’s well-worn stairs, ordered a Welsh rabbit, partook of two ‘stouts,’ and, the tears coursing down his right reverend cheeks, murmured—‘Britain! oh my country! _Delenda est Carthago!_’ by way of chorus to Captain Costigan’s favourite ditty of ‘The Night before Larry was stretched?’”

In the famous gardens of the Villa Pallavicini, near Genoa, there is an artificial piece of water winding between rocks, at the extremity of which the mimic river seems to lose itself in the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Nothing of the sort is the case: the sea is, in reality, more than three hundred yards distant; but the intervening ground has been so dexterously sloped and masked with groups of plants, that the optical delusion is marvellous. Of such are the aspirations of mankind. In such disappointment ended my castles in the air with respect to Evans’s. It was from across the ocean that I had to respond to the printers’ wail for “copy:” this article was commenced in view of the Castle of Rolandseck, on board a Rhine steamer, whose worn-out engines throbbed as irregularly as though they had palpitation of the heart. It is being continued now at the sea-side, in bed, gruel on the one side, sweet spirits of nitre on the other: and where it will be finished, who can tell? Old Æsop told the soldiers, when they asked him whither he was going, that he did not know, whereupon they arrested him for an impertinent. “Was I not right?” he cried; “did I know that I was going to jail?” “_Sait on où l’on va?_” echoes Diderot. How do I, how do you, how does your lordship, how does your grace, how does your majesty, know what will happen the moment after this? Therefore, take heed of the present time, and make your wills: the best will, in my humble thinking, that a man can make, being that strong will and determination to act as justly as he can in each moment in the which he is permitted to live.

So you understand, now, why I was compelled to dispense with the assistance of Mr. Paddy Green and Mr. Peter Cunningham, and why I am reduced to a dependence on my own personal reminiscences with respect to Evans’s, without the adventitious aid of recondite anecdote and historical data. Here is the place as I remember it.

One o’clock in the morning. Of course we are supposed to be spending just a fortnight in town, and putting up at the Bedford, or it would never do to be so early-late abroad. We have been to the play, and have consumed a few oysters in the Haymarket; but the principal effect of that refreshment seems to have been to make us ten times hungrier. The delicate bivalves of Colchester have failed in appeasing our bucolic stomachs. We require meat. So, says the friend most learned in the ways of the town to his companion—“Meat at our hotel we eschew, for we shall find the entertainment of the dearest and dullest. We will go sup at Evans’s, for there we can have good meat and good liquor at fair rates, and hear a good song besides.” Whereupon we walk, till the piazza, about which I have kept you so long lingering, looms in sight. A low doorway, brilliantly lit with gas, greets our view. We descend a flight of some steps, pass through a vestibule, and enter the “Cave of Harmony.”

Push further on, if you please. You are not to linger in this ante-chamber, thickly hung with pictures, and otherwise, with its circular marble tables, much resembling a Parisian _café_, minus the mirrors and the rattle of the dominoes. This ante-chamber will be treated of anon; but your present business is with chops and harmony.

Passing, then, through this _atrium_, the visitor finds himself in a vast music-hall, of really noble proportions, and decorated not only with admirable taste, but with something nearly akin to splendour. You see I am at a loss for authorities again, and I cannot tell you how much of the hall is Corinthian, and how much composite; whether the columns are fluted, the cornices gilt or the soffits carved, and whether the Renaissance or the Arabesque style most prevails in the decorations employed. All I know is, that it is a lofty, handsome, comfortable room, whose acoustic properties, by the way, are far superior to those enjoyed by some establishments with loftier philharmonic pretensions. At the northern extremity of the hall is a spacious proscenium and stage, with the grand pianoforte _de rigueur_, the whole veiled by a curtain in the intervals of performance. As for the huge area stretching from the proscenium to a row of columns which separate it from the ante-chamber _café_, it is occupied by parallel lines of tables, which, if they do not groan beneath the weight of good eatables and drinkables piled upon them, might certainly be excused for groaning—to say nothing of shrieking, yelling, and uttering other lamentable noises, evoked by the unmerciful thumping and hammering they undergo at the conclusion of every fresh exercitation of harmony.

Still, the eatables and drinkables do merit a paragraph, and shall have one. To the contemplative mind they are full of suggestions, and evidence of the vast digestive powers of the English people. To any but a race of hardy Norsemen, sons of Thor and Odin, hammerers of steel, welders of iron, and compellers of adverse elements, men who are sometimes brought to live when on shipboard upon weevily biscuit that breaks the teeth, and salted leather, humorously nicknamed beef; or in trenches, upon rancid pork, toasted on bayonet or ramrod tips; to any but that unconquerable, hard-headed, and strong-stomached people, of whom it is sometimes said that they would eat a donkey if they were allowed to begin at the hind legs, this post-midnight repast at Evans’s would be full of menace of perturbed slumbers, distraught dreams, nay, even ghastly nightmares. Your Frenchman, when he sups, takes his cold salad, his appetising fruit, his succulent partridge, his light omelette, or, at most, his thin weak _bouillon_, with a lean cutlet to follow. He drinks sugar-and-water, wine-and-water, or, on high holiday nights, a glass or two of champagne; puffs his mild cigars, and goes to bed, simpering that he has _bien soupé_. And even then, sometimes, your Frenchman has dreams, and rising in bed, with the hair of his flesh standing up, vows that he will sup no more. Your Italian sups on his three-halfpennyworth of maccaroni. Your Spaniard rubs a piece of bread with garlic, and eats it, blesses heaven, and goes to sleep with a cigarette in his mouth. Your gross German affects the lighter kind of cold meats and salads at supper, and washes down his spare repast—to be sure, it is the fourth within the twelve hours—with some frothy beer. The Americans can’t be said to sup, any more than they breakfast, lunch, or dine. They are always over-eating, over-drinking, and over-smoking themselves; and were it not for their indomitable pluck and perseverance, their tendency to dyspepsia would be an insurmountable obstacle to their ever becoming a great people. _For the great peoples have always had strong stomachs._ Homer’s heroes ate beef undone. When the Romans took to made-dishes and kick-shaws, then came their decadence, and the strong-stomached barbarians of the North overran them. To make an end of foreign wanderings, Russian suppers, among the people, are just no suppers at all. One—or at most two—meals a day, is the rule with the moujik. In elegant society, the cook might as well provide for supper painted chickens and lobster salads made of sealing-wax and cut paper, as any genuine viands. A supper at St. Petersburg, means champagne and gambling till the next morning.

But see the suppers set forth for the strong-stomached supporters of Evans’s. See the pyramids of dishes arrive; the steaming succession of red-hot chops, with their brown, frizzling caudal appendages sobbing hot tears of passionate fat. See the serene kidneys unsubdued, though grilled, smiling though cooked, weltering proudly in their noble gravy, like warriors who have fallen upon the field of honour. See the hot yellow lava of the Welsh rabbit stream over and engulf the timid toast. Sniff the fragrant vapour of the corpulent sausage. Mark how the russet leathern-coated baked potato at first defies the knife, then gracefully cedes, and through a lengthened gash yields its farinaceous effervescence to the influence of butter and catsup. The only refreshments present open to even a suspicion of effeminacy are the poached eggs, glistening like suns in a firmament of willow-pattern plate; and those too, I am willing to believe, are only taken by country-gentlemen hard pressed by hunger, just to “stay their stomachs,” while the more important chops and kidneys are being prepared. The clouds of pepper shaken out on these viands are enough to make Slawkenbergius sneeze for a fortnight; the catsup and strong sauces poured over them are sufficient to convince Sir Toby Belch that there are other things besides ginger, which are apt to be “hot i’ the mouth,” and, as humble servitors in attendance on these haughty meats, are unnumbered discs of butter, and manchets of crustiest bread galore.

Pints of stout, if you please, no puny half-measures, pints of sparkling pale ale, or creaming Scotch, or brownest Burton, moisten these sturdy rations. And when the strong men have supped, or rather before they have supped, and while they have supped, and indeed generally during the evening, there bursts out a strong smell of something good to drink; and presently you perceive that the strong men have ordered potent libations of spirituous liquors, hot whiskey-and-water being the favourite one; and are hastily brewing mighty jorums of punch and grog, which they undoubtedly quaff; puffing, meanwhile, cigars of potency and fragrance—pipes are tabooed—taken either from their own cigar-cases, or else recently laid in from the inexhaustible stores of the complaisant Herr von Joel.

“Who will always be retained on this establishment,” the proprietor good-naturedly promises, and more good-naturedly performs. “Why,” asks the neophyte, “is it necessary for my well-being, or the prosperity of this establishment, that the services of Herr von Joel should always be retained thereon? Why this perpetual hypothecation of Joel? Can no one else sell me cigars? What am I to Joel, or what is Joel to me? Confound Joel!” To which I answer: “Rash neophyte, forbear, and listen. In the days when thou wert very young and foolish, wore lay-down collars, and had no moustaches, save the stickiness produced by much-sucked sweetstuff on the upper lips—in the days when thou wert familiar, indeed, with Doctor Wackerbarth’s seminary for young gentlemen, but not with Evans’s—Herr von Joel, young and sprightly then, was a famous Mimic. In imitating the cries of birds, Herr von Joel was unrivalled, and has never been approached. In the old days, when he was famous, and did the lark and the linnet so well, he brought crowds of visitors to the old supper-rooms, who laughed and wondered at his mimicry, supped and drank, and smoked, and paid fat scores. So Joel, in his generation, was a benefactor to Evans’s. And now, when the thorax is rusty, and the larynx no longer supple, the faithful servant rests upon “his well-earned laurels”—of tobacco-leaves—among the old faces of old friends. “His helmet is a hive for bees”—and Havannah cigars, and “his services will always be retained in this establishment.” One would shudder to think of Wellington’s old charger, Copenhagen, being sent to Cow Cross, to the knackers, instead of ending his days peacefully in a paddock at Strathfieldsaye. No one likes to hear of Sophie Arnould or Mademoiselle Camargo (the ballet-dancer who introduced short petticoats) being brought to indigence in their declining years. Guilbert in the hospital, Camöens starving, blind Belisarius begging for an obolus, these are pitiable; and to this day I think the country might have done something for the widow of Ramo Samee. We give pensions to the families of those who use their swords well, but I should like to know how many can swallow them as Ramo did?