Chapter XVI: Part 16

All the while the company have been supping and I have been prosing, the “Cave of Harmony” has not belied its name. A bevy of fresh-coloured youths, of meagre stature, of curly hair, in broad collars and round jackets, such as distinguished you and me, neophyte, when we were pupils at Dr. Wackerbarth’s, have made themselves manifest on the stage, and in admirable time and tune have chanted with their silver-bell voices those rare old glees which were written by the honest old masters before the Father of Evil had invented Signor Guiseppe Verdi. Thersites Theorbo (who is an assiduous frequenter of the Cave at hours when men of not so transcendent a genius are in bed) Thersites Theorbo, down yonder in the _café_ ante-saloon, glowering over his grog, cannot forbear beating time and wagging his august head approvingly when he hears the little boys sing. May their pure harmony do the battered old cynic good! Honest old glees! though your composers wore pigtails and laced ruffles. And none the worse, either, because we owe some of the most beautiful of them to an Irish nobleman. Do you know who that nobleman was? Go ask Mr. Thackeray, who, in an absurd copy of verses, written in barbarous Cockney slang, has brought the “unaccustomed brine” to these eyes many and many a time. He describes a stately lady sitting by an open window, beside the “flowing Boyne,” with a baby on her lap. It is a man child, and not far off is the father,

“... Most musical of Lords,
A playing madrigals and glees
Upon the harpsichords.”

And this child’s father was old Lord Mornington, whose son was Arthur, Duke of Wellington.

If you scrutinise the faces of these juvenile choristers somewhat narrowly, and happen yourself to be a tolerably regular attendant at the abbey church of St. Peter’s, Westminster, it is not at all improbable that you may recognise one or two young gentlemen whom, arrayed in snowy surplices, you may have heard trilling forth in shrill notes their parts of the service among the gentlemen choristers and minor canons of the Abbey. I wonder if it is very wicked for them to be found at Evans’s thus late. I don’t mean at one o’clock in the morning, for they mostly disappear about midnight. Perhaps not so wicked, for I know there are some people so very religious that they only think of religion on Sundays; and fancy that week-day transactions can’t have the slightest connection with the Sabbath. However this may be, I must mention it as a curious fact in relation with the moral economy of Evans’s, that in the old days, when Captain Costigan or one of his peers, was about to sing anything approaching to a _chanson grivoise_, the juveniles were invariably marched out of the room by a discreet waiter, in order that their young ears might not be contaminated.

With respect to the remaining harmonic attractions of Evans’s, I shall be very brief. I believe that on some evenings individuals of the Ethiopian way of thinking, and accoutred in the ordinary amount of lamp-black, Welsh wig, and shirt-collars, and provided with the usual banjo, accordion, tambourine, and bones, are in the habit of informing the audience that things in general are assuming an appearance of “Hoop de dooden do;” also of lamenting the untimely demise of one Ned, an aged blackamoor, who stood towards them in an avuncular relation, and of passionately demanding the cause of their master effecting the sale of their persons, by auction or otherwise, on the day on which they entered into the state of matrimony. I am given to understand that a gentleman with an astonishing falsetto voice is a great favourite among the _habitués_, and that some screaming comic songs by popular vocalists are nightly given with immense applause; but I candidly confess that I am not qualified to speak with any great degree of certitude with respect to these performances. I go to Evans’s generally very late, and as seldom venture close to the proscenium. I am content to bide in the ante-saloon, and to muse upon Thersites Theorbo, glowering over his grog.

This iracund journalist—to borrow an epithet from Mr. Carlyle—is not by any means solitary in his patronage of the marble-tabled, portrait-hung _café_. To tell the honest truth, as, in Paris, if you wish to see the actors in vogue, you must go to the Café du Vaudeville—if the authors, to the Café Cardinal or the Café du Helder—if the artists, to the Café des Italians—if the students, to the Café Belge—and if the dandies, to the Café de Paris; so in London, if you wish to see the wits and the journalist men about town of the day, you must go to Evans’s about one o’clock in the morning. Then those ineffables turn out of the smoking-rooms of their clubs—clique-clubs mostly—and meet on this neutral ground to gird at one another. _Autres temps, autres mœurs._ A century since it used to be Wills’s or Button’s, or the Rose; now it is Evans’s. I should dearly like to draw some pen-and-ink portraits for you of the wits as they sit, and drink, and smoke, at one o’clock in the morning; but I dare not. As for Thersites Theorbo, he is a shadow. You know what I told you about clubs; and this place also is a prison-house to me. It is true, Heaven help me, that I am not affiliated to witcraft myself, that I am neither priest nor deacon. Still I have been one of the little boys in red cassocks, who swing the censers, and I dare not reveal the secrets of the sacristy. But I may just whisper furtively in your ear, that Ethelred Guffoon is never seen at Evans’s. It makes his head ache. Mr. Goodman Twoshoes, also, is but a seldom visitor to the Cave of Harmony. He prefers his snug corner-box at the Albion, where he can brew his beloved ginger-punch. It is not that the wits despise the “Cave.” Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, not unfrequently condescends to wither mankind through his spectacles from one of the marble tables; and I have seen the whole “Times” newspaper—proprietors, editors, special correspondents, and literary critics—hob-nobbing together at—— _Will_ you hold your tongue, sir?

One trifling indiscretion more, and I have done with Evans’s. “It is not generally known,” as accurate, erudite, and amusing Mr. John Timbs would say, that the sly gallantry of Mr. Green, the proprietor of the Cave of Harmony, caused him, when his new and sumptuous music-hall was in course of construction, to move the architect to build some cunning loop-holes and points of espial connected with commodious apartments—in other words, with private boxes, somewhat resembling the _baignoires_ in the Parisian theatres, whence ladies could see and hear all that was going on without being seen or heard. A somewhat similar contrivance exists, it will be remembered, in our House of Commons; I only wish that the fair ones who there lie _perdues_ during a late debate, were doomed to hear as little trash as meets their ears from the secluded bowers overhanging Evans’s. What passport is required to ensure admission into these blissful regions I know not; but I have it on good authority that ladies of the “very highest rank and distinction”—to use a “Morning Postism”—have on several occasions graced Evans’s with their presence, and with condescending smiles looked down upon the revelries of their lords.

* * * * *

Tell me, you who are so quick of hearing, what is that noise above our heads—it must be in the street beyond—and which dominates the revelry as the sound of the cannon did the music of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball before Quatre Bras. It grows louder and louder, it comes nearer and nearer, it swells into a hoarse continually-jarring roar, as I sit smoking at Evans’s. The sham blackamoor on the stage pauses in his buffoonery, forbears to smite his woolly pate with the tambourine; his colleague’s accordion is suspended in the midst of a phthisic wheeze, and the abhorred bones quiver, yet unreverberate in the nicoto-alcholoicho-charged air. The rattle of knives and forks, the buzzing conversation, cease; a hundred queries as to the cause of the noise rise on as many lips; the waiters forget to rattle the change, the toper forgets to sip his grog: there is intromission even in the inspiration of tobacco fumes: then comes the mighty answer—comes at once from all quarters—caught up, echoed and re-echoed, and fraught with dread, the momentous word—FIRE!

Man, it has been somewhere pertinently observed, is a hunting animal. The delight in having something to run after: whether it be a pickpocket, who has just eloped with a watch or a silk handkerchief; a dog with a kettle tied to his tail, a hare, a deer, a woman, a fugitive hat, a slaver, a _prima donna_, a lord’s tuft, an oriental traveller, a deformed dwarf—something to chase, something to scour and scud after, something to run down, and ultimately devour and destroy: such a pursuit enlivens and comforts the heart of man, and makes him remember that he has the blood of Nimrod in his veins. The schoolboys at Eton have their “paper chases,” and course miles through the pleasant playing-fields, crossing brooks, and tearing through hedges, after a quire of foolscap torn up into shreds. The child chases a butterfly; the adult exhausts himself and his horse in racing after a much-stinking fox; and the octogenarian frets his palsied old limbs, and bursts into a feverish snail’s gallop, after a seat on the Treasury Bench, or a strip of blue velvet embroidered with “_honi soit qui mal y pense_” in gold, and called a garter. There is a wild, engrossing excitement and pleasure in hunting; the fox-hound, the otter, the “harmless necessary cat,” would tell you so, were their speech articulate; but of all things huntable, chasable, rundownable, I doubt if there be one that can equal a Fire.

“Fire! fire!” It matters not how late the hour be, how important the avocations of the moment, that magic cry sets all legs, save those of the halt and the bed-ridden, in motion—strikes on every tympanum. “Fire! fire!” as the sound rolls earwards, the gambler starts up from the dicing-table, the bibber leaves the wine-pots, the lover rises from his mistress’s feet, the blushing maiden forgets half of that last glowing declaration, the captive runs to his grated window, the sluggard sits up on his couch, the sick man turns his head on his pillow to whence issues the portentous cry. Hundreds of impulses are bound up in the uncontrollable desire that prompts us to run at once after the “Fire!” Fear: it may be our own premises that are blazing, our own dear ones that are in peril. Hope and cupidity: we may be rogues, and there may be rich plunder from a fire. Duty: we may be policemen, firemen, or newspaper reporters. Generous emulation, brave self-devotion: there may be lives at stake and lives to save. Curiosity: it is as good to see a house burned (when it doesn’t happen to be your own) as a bear baited or a man hanged. All these may prompt us to follow the howl of the fire-dogs; but, chiefest of all, is the vague, indefinite, yet omnipotent desire to swell a pursuing crowd, to join in a hue and cry, to press to the van of the chasers: to hunt something, in fact.

I never could understand where a London crowd comes from. Be the hour ever so late, were the street ever so deserted a moment before, a man quarrelling with his wife, or cry of Fire, will be sufficient to evoke the presence of a compact and curious crowd, growing instantaneously thicker and noisier. Whether they start from the sewers or the cellar-gratings, or drop from the chimney-pots or the roof-copings, is indeterminate; yet they gather somehow, and jostle, squeeze, yell, stamp, and tear furiously. No conscription, no mustering of the _posse comitatis_, no summoning of ban and _arrière_ ban, no “call of the House,” no sending forth of the “fiery cross,” no beacon signalling, no Vehmgericht convening under penalty of the cord and dagger, could be half so successful in calling multitudes together as the one word—FIRE! A minute past, I was at Evans’s, tranquilly conversing with the veteran Herr von Joel, and now I find myself racing like mad up St. Martin’s Lane, towards St. Giles’s. How I found my hat and donned it I haven’t the slightest idea, and I sincerely hope that I didn’t forget to pay the waiter for my chop, kidney, stout, and etceteras. All I know is, that I am running after that hoarse cry, and towards that awful Redness in the sky; that I tread upon unnumbered corns; that I hold cheap as air, innumerable punches and thrusts which I receive from my neighbours; and that I will not by any means undertake to make oath that I am not myself also vociferating, “Fire! Fire!” with the full strength of my lungs.

I thought so. There goes the “Country Fire Office.” There it goes, dashing, rattling, blazing along—only the very strongest adjective, used participle-wise, can give a notion of its bewildering speed—there it goes, with its strong, handsome horses, champing, fuming, setting the pavement on fire with their space-devouring hoofs, and seeming to participate in the fire-hunting mania. They need no whip; only the voices of the firemen, clustering on the engine like bees, the loose rattle of the reins on their backs, and the cheers of the accompanying crowd. The very engine, burnished and glistening, flashing and blushing in its scarlet and gold in the gaslight, seems imbued with feeling, and scintillating with excitement—(Oh! critics of fishy blood, oyster temperament, and tortoise impulses, pardon my heedless exuberance of epithet)—so gleaming and glittering, and its catherine-like wheels revolving, and the moon just tipping the burnished helmets and hatchets of the fire-men, who will have a ruddy glare on those accoutrements shortly, goes screaming through the night, the County Fire-engine. The Northern Express blazing over Chatmoss at speed is a terrible sight to see: that fiery messenger has subdued the wilderness, and made the waste places, whilom the haunts of bats and dragons, tremble; but the fast-tearing fire-engine is nobler and more Human. It cleaves its way through the sleeping city; it bears the tidings of succour and deliverance. Yon express-train may convey but a company of chapmen and pedlars, thirsting to higgle in the cheapest so that they may haggle in the dearest market; but the five-engine is freighted with brave manly hearts, braced—with little lust of lucre, God knows! for their pay is but a pittance—to the noble task of saving human life. That they do so save it, almost every night throughout the year, save it in the midst of peril to their own, in the ever-imminent peril of a sudden, hideous, unrewarded death, Mr. Braidwood and the fire companies know full well. That the best of the young British painting men, John Everett Millais, should have chosen the every-day, but none the less glorious, heroism of a fireman for the theme of a magnificent picture, is good to know; and the very thought of the picture goes far towards making us forgive the painter for his asinine “Sir Isumbrasse,” or whatever the abortion was called; but it would be better if the knowledge of our firemen’s good deservings were extended beyond Mr. Braidwood and the fire companies. The deeds of those plain men with the leathern helmets and the trusty hatchets, have received neither their full meed of praise, nor a tithe of their meed of reward. I have yet to hear of the Fireman’s Order of Valour; I have yet to learn that our bounteous Government, so prompt to recognise diplomatic demerit, to reward political worthlessness, and to ennoble military failure, have thought it worth their while to bestow even the minutest modicum of a pension on a fireman. To be sure, these worldly, unwise men, are, for their own interests’ sake, disastrously and inexcusably modest, unobtrusive, and retiring. There is no trumpeter attached _ex-officio_ to the fire brigade. Would you believe it, that these unambitious men, their glorious labours over, are content to retire to the sheds where their engines stand at livery, where they eat bread-and-cheese with clasp knives, read cheap newspapers, and teach tricks to their dogs? Their principal recreation is to scrub, polish, tickle, and frictionise the brass and wood work of the fire-engines to a Dutch pitch of cleanliness, and they are much given, I am sorry to say, to the smoking of long clay pipes. This is, in itself, sufficient to ruin them in the estimation of such sages and public benefactors as ex-Lord Mayor Garden. Let us hope that it is not his ex-Lordship’s house that is being burned down this November morning.

No—the fire is in the very thickest part of St. Giles’s. Unfaithful topographers may have told you that the “Holy Land” being swept away and Buckeridge Street being pulled down, St. Giles’s exists no more. _Ne’n croyez rien._ The place yet lives—hideous, squalid, decrepit—yet full of an unwholesome vitality. Splendid streets have been pierced through the heart of this region—streets full of mansions four and six storeys high—affluent tradesmen display their splendid wares through glistening plate-glass windows. But St. Giles’s is behind, round about, environing the new erections, sitting like Mordecai in the gate on the threshold of the brick and mortar and stucco palaces with which cunning contractors and speculative builders have sought to disguise the most infamous district in London. The proof of what I have asserted is very easy. You have but to be invited to dinner in Gower Street, or to have a morning call to make in Bedford Square. Take a walk from young Mr. Barry’s bran-new opera-house in Bow Street, and walk straight a-head—nearly a measured mile to the Square of Bedford. You pass the gigantic carriage factory, which I will call by its ancestral name of Houlditch’s—for it always seems to be changing proprietors—at the corner of Long Acre. You ascend Endell Street, and greet with satisfaction such signs of advancing civilisation as baths and wash-houses, and a bran-new dispensary. I had forgotten to mention that you might have had a back view of St. Martin’s Hall. Then you cross the area of High Street, St. Giles’s, or High Street, Holborn, whichsoever you may elect to call it. Then, still straight a-head, you mount Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, a thoroughfare dignified by any number of churches, belonging to any number of persuasions. And then you are at your journey’s end, and are free to call in Bedford Square, to dine in Gower Street, or to go see the Nineveh Marbles in the British Museum, _comme bon vous semble_.

But throughout this pilgrimage, passing by edifices erected in the newest Byzantine, or early English, or Elizabethan, or sham Gothic style, you have had St. Giles’s always before, behind, and about you. From a hundred foul lanes and alleys have debouched, on to the spick-and-span-new promenade, unheard-of human horrors. Gibbering forms of men and women in filthy rags, with fiery heads of shock hair, the roots beginning an inch from the eyebrows, with the eyes themselves bleared and gummy, with gashes filled with yellow fangs for teeth, with rough holes punched in the nasal cartilage for nostrils, with sprawling hands and splay feet, tessellated with dirt—awful deformities, with horrifying malformations of the limbs and running sores ostentatiously displayed; Ghoules and Afrits in a travestie of human form, rattling uncouth forms of speech in their vitrified throttles. These hang about your feet like reptiles, or crawl round you like loathsome vermin, and in a demoniac whine beg charity from you. One can bear the men; ferocious and repulsive as they are, a penny and a threat will send them cowering and cursing to their noisome holes again. One cannot bear the women without a shudder, and a feeling of infinite sorrow and humiliation. They are so horrible to look upon, so thoroughly unsexed, shameless. Heaven-abandoned and forlorn, with their bare liver-coloured feet beating the devil’s tattoo on the pavement, their lean shoulders shrugged up to their sallow cheeks, over which falls hair either wildly dishevelled or filthily matted, and their gaunt hands clutching at the tattered remnant of a shawl, which but sorrily veils the lamentable fact that they have no gown—that a ragged petticoat and a more ragged undergarment are all they have to cover themselves withal. With sternness and determination one can bear these sights; but, heavens and earth! the little children! who swarm, pullulate—who seem to be evoked from the gutter, and called up from the kennel, who clamber about your knees, who lie so thickly in your path that you are near stumbling over one of them every moment, who, ten times raggeder, dirtier, and more wretched-looking than their elders, with their baby faces rendered wolfish by privation, and looking a hundred years old, rather than not ten times that number of days, fight and scream, whimper and fondle, crawl and leap like the phantoms a man sees during the access of _delirium tremens_. I declare that there are babies among these miserable ones—babies with the preternaturally wise faces of grown up men; babies who, I doubt little, can lie, and steal, and beg, and who, in a year or so, will be able to fight and swear, and be sent to jail for six months’ hard labour. Plenty of the children are big enough to be “whipped and discharged.” Yes; that is the pleasant tee-totum: “six months’ hard labour,” “whipped and discharged,” the merry prologue to Portland and the hulks, the humorous apprenticeship to the penal settlements and the gallows. And yet people will tell me that St. Giles’s is “done away with”—“put down,” as the worshipful Sir Peter Laurie would say. Glance down any one of the narrow lanes you like after passing Broker’s Row. See the children coming out of the gin-shops and the pawnbrokers’. Ask the policeman whether every court in the vicinity be not full of thieves, and worse. Look at the lanes themselves, with the filthy rags flaunting from poles in the windows in bitter mockery of being hung out to dry after washing; with their belching doorways, the thresholds littered with wallowing infants, and revealing beyond a Dantean perspective of infected backyard and cloacan staircase. Peep, as well as you may for the dirt-obscured window panes, and see the dens of wretchedness where the people whose existence you ignore dwell—the sick and infirm, often the dying, sometimes the dead, lying on the bare floor, or, at best, covered with some tattered scraps of blanketing or matting; the shivering age crouching over fireless grates, and drunken husbands bursting through the rotten doors to seize their gaunt wives by the hair, and bruise their already swollen faces, because they have pawned what few rags remain to purchase gin. But then St. Giles’s doesn’t exist! It has been done away with! It is put down! “Stunning Joe Banks” and Bamfylde Moore Carew have been subdued by civilisation and the march of intellect! Of course.

Notwithstanding all which there is a terrific fire in the very midst of St. Giles’s to-night; and that conflagration may do more in its generation towards the abolition of the district, than all the astute contractors and speculative builders. The fire is at an oilman’s shop, who likewise manufactures and deals in pickles, and from the nature of the combustible commodities in which he trades, you may anticipate a rare blaze. Blaze! say an eruption of Mount Vesuvius rather; far high into the air shoot columns of flame, and hanging thickly over all are billows upon billows of crimson smoke, the whole encircled by myriads of fiery sparks that fall upon the gaping crowd and make them dance and yell with terror and excitement.

The police have very speedily made a sanitary _cordon_ round about the blazing premises, and let none pass save those who have special business near the place. The firemen are “welcome guests” within the magic _cordon_, as also the fussy, self-important sergeants and inspectors of police, who often do more harm than good with their orders and counter-orders. There are some other gentlemen, too, who slip in and out unquestioned and unchallenged. They don’t pump at the fire-engines, and they don’t volunteer to man the fire-escape. But they seem to have an undisputed though unrecognised right to be here, there, and everywhere, and are received on a footing of humorous equality by the police, the fire-escape men, the firemen, and the very firemen’s dogs. They are not official-looking persons by any means. They wear no uniforms, they carry no signs of authority, such as truncheons, armlets, or the like. They are rather given, on the contrary, to a plain and unpretending, not to say “seedy,” style of attire. Napless hats, surtouts tightly buttoned up to the throat and white at the seams, pantaloons of undecided length, unblackened bluchers, and umbrellas, seem to be the favourite wear among these gentlemen. They are, not to mince the matter, what are termed “occasional reporters” to the daily newspapers, and, in less courteous parlance, are denominated “penny-a-liners.” It is the vocation of these gentlemen (worthy souls for the most part—working very hard for very little money) to prowl continually about London town, in search of fires, fallings in and down of houses, runnings away of vicious horses, breakings down of cabs, carriages, and omnibuses; and, in fact, accidents and casualties of every description. But especially fires. Fatal accidents are not unnaturally preferred by the occasional reporters, because they lead to coroners’ inquests, which have of course also to be reported; and, in the case of a fire, a slight loss of life is not objected to. It entails “additional particulars,” and perhaps an inquiry before the coroner, with an examination of witnesses relative to the cause of the fire; nay, who knows but it may end in a trial for arson? There was—and may be now—a gentleman attached to the combustible department of the press, who was so well known and practised a hand at reporting conflagrations, that he was christened, and to some extent popularly known as, the “Fire King.” It was facetiously suggested that he was unconsumable, made of asbestos, not to be affected by heat, like Signor Buono Cuore at Cremorne Gardens. According to the legend current in London newspaper circles, the “Fire King” had his abode next door to a fire-engine station in the Waterloo Road, and further to guard against the possibility of missing one of these interesting, and, to him, remunerative events, he caused to be inscribed on the door-jamb, in lieu of the ordinary injunction to “ring the top bell,” this solitary announcement on a neat brass plate, “Fire Bell.” So, when a fire was signalled within the beat of that portion of the brigade stationed in the Waterloo Road—or, indeed, anywhere else if of sufficient magnitude, for the brigade are not by any means particular as to distances, and would as lief go down the river to Gravesend or up it to Henley if occasion required—a stalwart brigadier, his helmet and hatchet all donned, would pull lustily at the fire-bell, accompanying the tintinnabulation by stentorian shouts of “Wake up, Charley!” Charley, the “Fire King,” perhaps at that moment serenely dreaming of new Great Fires of London, Temples of Diana at Ephesus, and Minsters at York, ignited by Erostatratuses and Jonathan Martins yet unborn, would sing out of the window a sonorous “All right!” hastily dress, descend, jump on the ready-harnessed engine, and be conveyed jubilantly, as fast as ever the horses could carry him, to the scene of the fire. But two stains existed on the “Fire King’s” otherwise fair escutcheon. It was darkly rumoured that on one occasion—it was a very fat fire at a patent candle manufactory—he had offered to bribe the turncock, so tampering with the supply of water; and that on another, it being a remarkably cold winter’s night, he expressed a hope that the main might be frozen. And yet a more tender-hearted man—“additional particulars,” and the claim of a wife and large family being put out of the question—than the Fire King, does not exist.

Meanwhile the oil and pickle man’s house blazes tremendously. The houses on either side must go too; so think the firemen. Fears are entertained for the safety of the houses over the way, already scorched and blistering, and the adjoining tenements within a circle of a hundred yards are sure to be more or less injured by water, for the street is wretchedly narrow, and the houses lean-to frightfully. One extremity of the thoroughfare has been shored up for years by beams, now rotting. The oil and pickle man is heavily insured, so is the contractor for army clothing over the way, so is the wholesale boot and shoe manufacturer next door. It would be a mercy if the whole decayed stack of buildings were swept away by the devouring, yet purifying element. Yes, a mercy, surely a mercy. But the miserable inhabitants of the crumbling tenements that cling like barnacles to the skirts of the great shops and factories, are they insured? See them swarming from their hovels half naked, frenzied with terror and amazement, bearing their trembling children in their arms, or lugging their lamentable shreds and scraps of household goods and chattels into the open. Are _they_ insured? The fire will send them to the workhouse, or, maybe, to the workhouse dead-wall—for they have no legal settlement there, or they are not casual paupers, or they haven’t seen the relieving-officer, or they are too early, or too late—there to crouch and die. To be sure, they ought never to have been born. _They_ are not necessary for the prosperity of the wholesale trade in boots and shoes, oil, pickles, and army clothing. Why cumber they the earth?

And still the fire leaps up into the cold morning air. The house will be gutted out and out, the police now say authoritatively. Happily there is no danger to be apprehended now for human life within the blazing pile. The oil and pickle chandler does not dwell in his warehouse. He has a snug villa at Highgate, and is very probably now contemplating the motley sky from his parlour-window, and wondering wherever the fire can be. The only living person who had to be rescued was an old housekeeper, who persisted in saying that she had lived in the house “seven and thirty year,” and wouldn’t leave it while one stone remained on another; which was not so very difficult a task, seeing that the premises were built throughout of brick. She had to be hustled at last, and after much to do, into the fire-escape; but for hours afterwards she led the firemen a terrible life respecting the fate of a certain tom-cat, of extraordinary sagacity, called Ginger, which she averred to have left sitting on the lid of the water-butt, but which very soon afterwards appeared in the flesh, so scorched that it smelt like burnt feathers, and clawing convulsively at the collar of a police-constable of the F. division. It is, perhaps, scarcely worth while to state that in the course of the fire a poor woman is carried from one of the adjoining hovels dead. She was close upon her confinement, and the child and she are gone to a more peaceable and merciful city, where lives, at least, are assured for ever.

Towards two o’clock, the columns of flame begin to grow slenderer, less continuous, more fitful. The clanking of the fire-engines does not decrease, however, in the least, though the firemen joyfully declare that the fire is “got under.” The surrounding publicans—who, though they closed at midnight, have all taken down their shutters with marvellous alacrity—are doing a roaring trade in beer, which is distributed to the volunteers at the pumps in sufficiently liberal quantities, a check being kept upon the amount consumed by means of tickets. Where the tickets come from I have no means of judging, but this wonderful fire-brigade seem prepared for everything.

So, feeling very hot and dry, and dazed about the eyes with constant contemplation of the flames, I leave St. Giles’s and the oil and pickle vender’s warehouse, which, when daylight comes, will be but a heap of charred, steaming ruins, and wander westward, musing over the fires I have seen and the fires I have read of. I think of the great fire of London in Charles’s time—the fire that began at Pudding Lane and ended at Pye Corner, and in commemoration of which they built that strange monument, with the gilt shaving-brush at the top—

“... London’s column, pointing to the skies,
Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies.”

I think of the great fire at the Tower of London in 1841, of which I was an eye-witness, and which consumed the hideous armouries built by William III. and their priceless contents. I think upon the great scuffle and scramble to rescue the crown and regalia from the threatened Jewel House, such a scuffle and scramble as had not taken place since Colonel Blood’s impudent attempt to steal those precious things. Then my mind reverts to the monster conflagration by which the winter palace at St. Petersburg was destroyed in 1839; of the strange discovery then made, that dozens of families lived on the roof of the palace—lived, and roosted, and died, and kept fowls and goats there, of whose existence the court and the imperial household had not the remotest idea; of the sentinel who died at his post, notwithstanding the imperial command to leave it, because he had not been relieved by his corporal; and of the Czar himself watching with compressed lips the destruction of his magnificent palace, and vainly entreating his officers not to risk their lives in endeavouring to save the furniture. One zealous aide-de-camp could not be dissuaded from the attempt to reach a magnificent pier-glass, framed in gold and malachite, from a wall, whereupon his Imperial Majesty, seeing that injunction, entreaty, menace were all in vain, hurled, with the full force of his gigantic arm, his opera-glass at the sheet of crystal, which was shivered to atoms by the blow. Not an uncharacteristic trait of Nicholas Romanoff.

TWO O’CLOCK A.M.—A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, AND THE TURNSTILE OF WATERLOO BRIDGE.

I never could understand politics (which difficulty of comprehension of a repulsive topic I share, I am delighted to know, with the whole charming female sex, for a woman who is a politician is to me no woman at all). I never could be consistent in public matters. If my remembrance serve me correctly, I think I began life as a flaming Conservative. I am now as flaming a Radical; but I admit that I am most deplorably deficient in consistency. I find myself, while straining every nerve to defend the cause, to advocate the rights, to denounce the oppressors of that English people of whom I am one, frequently halting on ground where Eglintoun Beaverup, the Conservative _par excellence_, and I can shake hands; I find myself acknowledging that “blood is thicker than water,” and that gentle birth will hold its own in the midst of sarcasms against the tenth transmitters of foolish faces. I find myself actuated now (as ever in that I have been consistent) by the same dislike and contempt for the cruel, capricious, ruffian, unteachable Mob—the base _decamisado canaille_, who are not the working classes, or the lower classes, or any other class, but the Father of confusion and anarchy’s—the scurvy mob who pelt a Castlereagh to-day and tear a John de Witt in pieces to-morrow; who slaughtered Rienzi, and yelped for joy when Madame Roland went to the guillotine; who cried for “justice” upon Charles Stuart, and danced round the Tyburn tree from which dangled the rotting corpse of Cromwell; who would trample on Henry Brougham or John Russell at the present writing, and rend their vitals, if _their_ mobbish majesty were crossed in one of its wild-baboon whims.

With this candid confession of my political shortcomings (I mean to stand some day for the borough of Weathercock), and having thus, I hope, disarmed criticism, I shall now venture into the (to me) perilous region of politics. It is Two o’Clock in the morning; we will even be present in the spirit at a late debate in the “House.”

Which august assembly has already been designated by some irreverent wag as a “large house which keeps bad hours.” In truth, one needs to be very intimately acquainted, not only with the framework, but with the minuter organisation of English society and institutions—(how sick I am, and you must be, of those eternally-recurring words “institutions” and “society!”)—to understand the causes of the immoderately late hours kept sometimes by the Lords, but with much greater frequency by the Commons’ House of Parliament. At the first blush, there seems no earthly reason why the legislative business of the nation should not be got over during the day, or, at the outside, before the night were spent. The French Deputies, Conventionalists, or Representatives in the National Assembly, in their stormiest and most prolonged debates, seldom heard the chimes at midnight; and, ardent parliamentarians as are the Americans, it is only towards the immediate close of the session that Congress keeps for two or three days and nights a sort of Saturnalia of untimely sittings. If report speaks true, the members of the United States Legislature are only enabled to bear these unwonted vigils by incessant recurrence to powerful stimulants. “Quislings,” “Fiscal Agents,” “Stone Fences,” “Bullocks’ Milk,” and the innumerable tribe of “Cocktails,” are at a premium during these abnormally protracted debates; the benches of the House and the desks of the members stand in imminent danger of being whittled away during the excitement of discussion; the amount of tobacco masticated is sufficient to ruin the digestive powers of the nation; the spittoons overflow, and the fretfulness and irritation not unnaturally engendered by nervous excitement, occasionally finds relief in cowhiding in the committee-rooms, gouging in the lobbies, and “stand up and drag out” fights on the august floor itself, occupied by the conscript fathers of the republic. Thus I have been informed; but it may be that report tells a fib, after all.

When we arrive, however, at a just understanding and appreciation of the mechanism of this wondrous British constitutional watch, jewelled in ever so many holes as it is, with its levers, and escapements, and unnumbered compensation balances, the lateness of our legislative hours will not be by far so much of a mystery to us. We are altogether a sitting-up late people. The continental theatres are all closed by eleven. We dismiss our audiences sometimes at midnight, oftener at half-past, or a quarter to one in the morning. Our fashionable balls commence when those of other nations are terminating. We may not dine so late, but then we sup heavily, hours afterwards. Night life in London does not condescend to commence till the “small hours;” yet, in dissipated Paris, you may count the _cafés_ and supper-rooms on your fingers whose portals are open at one o’clock in the morning. The “Journal des Debats” goes to press at four in the afternoon; eight hours later, there is yet often a leader to be written for the forthcoming number of the “Times.” The only capital that can equal London in the faculty of “keeping it up” to any number of hours, is St. Petersburg. There the antipathy which the Russians entertain for going to bed is solely surpassed by their aversion to getting up. They turn night into day; but the sturdy, strong-willed, perverse English work or dissipate nearly “twice round the clock.” They make the little children go to bed; yet the ambition even of those younglings is to “sit up late” like the grown people.

A French senator gets a thousand pounds a year for wearing a blue livery coat with a stand-up collar, the whole handsomely embroidered in gold; kerseymere small clothes, and silk stockings. He drives down to the Luxembourg in his brougham, about three in the afternoon, dozes for a couple of hours on a well-stuffed bench, goes home to dine, drink coffee, play tric-trac, read the “Gazette de France,” or receive a select circle of pensioned fogies like himself. He wakes up some fine morning to find himself complimented in the “Moniteur,” and the gratified recipient of the grand cross of the Legion of Honour. A member of the French _Corps Législatif_ receives his wages in a comparative ratio, and pursues an analogous cycle of “duties.” But look at an English member of Parliament. He receives nothing a year, and in many cases has little more than that problematical income, sometimes humorously characterised as “midshipman’s half-pay,” to live upon. If he be rich, so much the better; but wealth will not take away a tittle from his hard work. In the early morning, over his tea and toast, he has an ocean of correspondence, often frivolous, always wearisome, to wade through. Then he has his blue-books to dive into, his authorities to consult, his statistics to cram, his speeches to “coach,” his grievances to hunt up, his exordia to study, his perorations to practise. Comes the hour of morning calls when he must be at home, and give audience to the great army of Askers and the legionary tribe of bores, men who will take no denial, importunate clients, who want berths in the Post-office for themselves, or reversions of tide-waiterships for their cousins’ cousins. Happily for the member of Parliament, Mr. Rowland Hill’s penny-postage system has abolished the frank-hunting torture, which brought many M.P.’s to death’s door, and made more bitterly regret that they had ever been taught to write their own names. And woe be to the legislator if he receive not his visitors with courtesy! They probably are constituents, and a curt answer will frequently send them away charged with the deadliest schemes against that member’s vote and interest at the ensuing general election. As a diversion during the morning calls, the M.P. has to receive some dozens of applications for orders of admission to the Strangers’ Gallery of the House, he having always a couple at his disposal. After this, he has, perhaps, to wait upon the Prime Minister, in Downing Street, at the head of a deputation respecting the disputed right in a cess-pool; or he may be the chairman of some parliamentary committee, sitting, _de die in diem_, to inquire into the hideous turpitude of a contractor who has sewn so many pairs of soldiers’ boots without cobblers’ wax. Then, he has to take a cab to attend the great public meeting for the Evangelisation of Chinese beggars, held at the Mansion House. He is due about this time in the board-room of the public company of which he is a director; and at the special committee of the Benevolent Institution in which he takes so much interest. A pretty hard day’s work this, you will acknowledge. Add that the English member of Parliament has to be, over and above all this, a man of business or pleasure: with a wife and family very often, with a turn for literature, or art, or science, or natural history. He is a merchant or banker, and must drudge in his counting-house, like the meanest of his clerks, or gabble on ’Change with the nimblest-tongued bill-broker. He is a great counsel: he cannot plead the cause of “Stradlings _versus_ Styles,” by deputy, or allow his junior to sum up in the great will case. He is a celebrity of the fashionable world: he must pay his morning visits, ride in the Park, show himself at the “Corner,” lounge through his clubs, drop in at the opera at night; and, after all this, or rather in the midst of all this, and pervading it like a nightmare, there is the real business of his life—the “House.” He possesses some six hundred other colleagues, who are to the full as busily occupied as he is during the day, yet manage, somehow, to find themselves behind the Speaker’s chair, or at the gangway, at five o’clock in the afternoon. He had better not be unpunctual or remiss in his attendance. Those constituents of his, at Shrimpington-super-Mare, will call him to a strict account of his stewardship at the end of the session, and it may go hard with him at the Mechanics’ Institution or the Farmers’ Ordinary. Under all these circumstances, do you think it so very extraordinary that there should be occasionally a late debate in the House of Commons?

You will remark that I have preserved, throughout, a decorous reticence with regard to the House of Lords. Goodness forfend that I should have to judge their Lordships by the same business-like work-a-day standard which I have presumed to apply to the Lower House. Their Lordships meet early and separate early, as becometh their degree; yet even the Lords have their field-days, and their occasions when they sit up late o’ nights. Then the right reverend bishops come down, booted and spurred, to vote against the heathen; and paralytic old peers are borne to the House in litters, there to wheeze forth, in tremulous accents, their unalterable attachment to Church and State, so dangerously menaced in “another place,” and from their most noble pockets they pull forth “proxies,” signed by other peers more paralytic than themselves. But these field-days of the Lords are few and far between, and the _otium cum dignitate_ is the easy, comfortable rule with their Lordships. It is but doing them justice to say, however, that many peers have been members of the Lower House in their time, and have sat up as late, and battled in debate as fiercely, as any middle-aged member of her Majesty’s Opposition. Nor are they all idle, parliamentarily, in the day time. There are some noblemen—legal peers mostly—who disdain to rest upon their laurels, and are content to spend the long forenoons in listening to dreary disquisitions about the wrongs of Parsee traders, and the visionary pedigrees of claimants to dormant peerages. The Lords’ committee hear appeals, and it is a wondrous sight to see those old boys snoozing and twiddling their thumbs on the crimson benches of their golden chamber. They seem not to listen to the elaborate word-entanglements of the bewigged pleaders; yet they make remarks full of sense and pregnant with acumen. You are a young man or woman, dear reader of this, I hope. You have not much time to lose. Go straight down to Palace Yard, pass through Westminster Hall, and up the stone stairs, by the giant brazen candelabra and the great stained-glass window. So on through the Gothic vestibules and corridors—never mind the frescoes of Messrs. Dyce and Company, they are not worth looking at just now. Hie you quickly to a door-way half-screened by crimson drapery, and edge your way into the House of Lords. An you take off your hat and hold your tongue, you may stare about you as much as ever you please, and hear your fill of the edifying, if not amusing, appeals. You may wonder at the Lord Chancellor’s wrinkles and at his ruffles; you may listen to Floorem, Attorney-General, and Botherem, Q.C., till your eyes begin to wink, and your head to nod, and your whole mental framework to grow desperately weary; but you must not go entirely to sleep. Somnolence may entail a fall on the floor of the House, which would cause a noise, and would never do; so, unless you are gifted, like a horse, with the power of going to sleep standing, I would counsel you to take a cup of strong green tea before you enter the House, and so string your nerves up to wakefulness. For diversion, turn away your eyes from the verbose barristers in their horse-hair, silk, and bombazine, and look at their Lordships. There are not often more than half-a-dozen of them present—seldom so many as that. You shall scarcely fail, however, to miss that noble senator—a capital working man of business he is too—who is possessed by the curious idiosyncrasy of dressing in the exact similitude of his own butler: blue coat and brass buttons, yellow waistcoat, pepper-and-salt pantaloons—not trousers, mind—and low shoes. I think, even, that his Lordship’s head is powdered. You may object that there is no reason why a gentleman of the old school, wedded to traditions and reminiscences of _le bon vieux temps_, should not wear such a costume as this, and yet look every inch a nobleman. Nor is there, indeed; but glance for a moment at Lord Aspendale, and you will confess that, from hair-powder to shoe-string, there is a permeating flavour of the side-board and the still-room. Whether his Lordship likes it, or whether his Lordship can’t help it, it matters little; but the fact is there, plain and obvious.

Standing in the narrow Gothic railed-off space reserved for the public—the throne at the opposite extremity of the House—you may see on one of the benches to the right, almost every forenoon—Saturday and Sunday excepted—during the session, a very old man with a white head, and attired in a simple frock and trousers of shepherd’s plaid. It is a leonine head, and the white locks are bushy and profuse. So, too, the eyebrows, penthouses to eyes somewhat weak now, but that can flash fire yet upon occasions. The face is ploughed with wrinkles, as well it may be, for the old man will never see fourscore years again, and of these, threescore, at the very least, have been spent in study and the hardest labour, mental and physical. The nose is a marvel—protuberant, rugose, aggressive, inquiring, and defiant: unlovely, but intellectual. There is a trumpet mouth, a belligerent mouth, projecting and self-asserting; largish ears, and on chin or cheeks no vestige of hair. Not a beautiful man this on any theory of beauty, Hogarthesque, Ruskinesque, Winckelmanesque, or otherwise. Rather a shaggy, gnarled, battered, weatherbeaten, ugly, faithful, Scotch-colley type. Not a soft, imploring, yielding face. Rather a tearing, mocking, pugnacious, cast of countenance. The mouth is fashioned to the saying of harsh, hard, impertinent things: not cruel, but downright; but never to whisper compliments, or simper out platitudes. A nose, too, that can snuff the battle afar off, and with dilated nostrils breathe forth a glory that is sometimes terrible; but not a nose for a pouncet-box, or a Covent Garden bouquet, or a _flacon_ of Frangipani. Would not care much for truffles either I think, or the delicate aroma of sparkling Moselle. Would prefer onions or strongly-infused malt and hops: something honest and unsophisticated. Watch this old man narrowly, young visitor to the Lords. Scan his furrowed visage. Mark his odd angular ways and gestures passing uncouth. Now he crouches, very doglike, on his crimson bench: clasps one shepherd’s plaid leg in both his hands. Botherem, Q.C., is talking nonsense, I think. Now the legs are crossed, and the hands thrown behind the head; now he digs his elbows into the little Gothic writing-table before him, and buries the hands in that puissant white hair of his. The quiddities of Floorem, Q.C., are beyond human patience. Then with a wrench, a wriggle, a shake, a half turn and half start up—still very doglike, but of the Newfoundland rather, now, he asks a lawyer or a witness a question. Question very sharp and to the point, not often complimentary by-times, and couched in that which is neither broad Scotch nor Northumbrian burr, but a rebellious mixture of the two. Mark him well, eye him closely: you have not much time to lose. Alas! the giant is very old; though with frame yet unenfeebled, with intellect yet gloriously unclouded. But the sands are running, ever running. Watch him, mark him, eye him, score him on your mind tablets: then home; and in after years it may be your lot to tell your children, that once at least you have seen with your own eyes the famous Lord of Vaux; once listened to the voice that has shaken thrones and made tyrants tremble, that has been a herald of deliverance to millions pining in slavery and captivity; a voice that has given utterance, in man’s most eloquent words, to the noblest, wisest thoughts lent to this Man of Men by Heaven; a voice that has been trumpet-sounding these sixty years past in defence of Truth, and Right, and Justice—in advocacy of the claims of learning and industry, and of the liberties of the great English people, from whose ranks he rose; a voice that should be entitled to a hearing in a Walhalla of wise heroes, after Francis of Verulam and Isaac of Grantham; the voice of one who is worthily a lord, but who will be yet better remembered, and to all time—remembered enthusiastically and affectionately—as the champion of all good and wise and beautiful Human Things—HARRY BROUGHAM.