Chapter II: Part 2

At the “Cock,” in Love Lane, and at the “White Hart,” in Botolph Lane, there is a boiling-house in the rear of the premises. Each boiling-house consists of a spacious kitchen filled with immense cauldrons. Here winkle and whelk buyers, who have neither utensils nor convenient premises sufficient to boil at home, can have it done for them for fourpence a bushel. Each boiling is performed separately in a wicker-basket; crabs and lobsters may likewise be boiled at these houses. Half-a-dozen scores of the fish are packed in a large basket, shaped like a strawberry-pottle, a lid is put between each lot, and the hot-water torture is inflicted at the rate of sixpence a score.

If your servant, the writer, were not precluded by the terms of his contract from taking any natural rest, he might, pleading fatigue, retire to bed; and, tossing on an unquiet couch, as men must do who slip between the sheets when the blessed sun is shining, have fantastic dreams of Ned Ward and Sir William Walworth: dream of the market-scene in “Masaniello,” and hum a dream-reminiscence of “Behold, how brightly beams the morning!” which, of course, like all things appertaining to dreams, has no more resemblance to the original air than the tune the cow died of. Then fancy that he is a supernumerary in a pantomime, and that Mr. Flexmore, the clown, has jumped upon his shoulders, and is beating him about the ears with a “property” codfish. Then he might be Jonah, swallowed by the whale; and then Tobit’s fish. Then he would find himself half awake, and repeating some lines he remembered reading years ago, scrawled in ink on a huge placard outside the shop of Mr. Taylor, the famous fishmonger, in Lombard Street. Yes: they ran thus—

“So the ‘Times’ takes an interest in the case of Geils;
I wish it would take some in my eels!”

What a queer fish Mr. Taylor must have been! Where is he now? Why, he (your servant) is Taylor—Jeremy Taylor—Tom Taylor—Taylor the water-poet—Billy Taylor—the Three Tailors of Tooley Street—Mr. Toole, the toast-master of arts and buttered toast; and—he is asleep!

FIVE O’CLOCK A.M.—THE PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER.

“There she is—the great engine—she never sleeps. She has her
ambassadors in every quarter of the world—her couriers upon
every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her
envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets. They are ubiquitous.
Yonder Journal has an agent at this minute giving bribes at
Madrid; and another inspecting the price of potatoes at Covent
Garden.”

“PENDENNIS.”

If you have no objection to the statement of the fact, I would beg to observe that our present station on the clock face, twice round which we have to go, is now five in the morning; and that at five a.m. the publication of the “Times” newspaper is, to use a north-country mining expression, in “full blast.” You abhor the politics of the journal in question, you say: you consider the “Times” and “Evening Mail” to be the organ of a company, with limited liability, composed of the Emperor Alexander, Cardinal Wiseman, Baron Rothschild, Prince Aali Pacha, Metternich, Doctor Cumming, Baring Brothers, Lord Palmerston, Mr. Disraeli, Mr. W. J. Fox, and Miss Martineau. You are offended with the “Times” because the editor declined to insert that last six-paged letter from you against organ grinding. Never mind, you must come all the same to see the paper published. For the publication of the “Times” is a great, an enormous, a marvellous fact: none the less wonderful for being repeated three hundred and thirteen times a-year. It is a pulsation of London’s mighty heart, that should not be neglected. It is the daily booming of a tocsin, which, year after year, proclaims progress, and still progress to the nations; which is the joy bell to the good, the passing bell to the bad, the world is blessed or cursed with; which rings out ignorance and prejudice and superstition, and rings in knowledge and enlightenment and truth. The “Times” is not alone in the possession of a peal of bells of this kind; and many daily, more weekly, papers ring out, loud and clear, to eager listeners; were your vassal not one of the modestest of men, he would hint that for the last dozen years he has been agitating daily and weekly a little tintinnabulum with what lustiness his nerveless arm will let him. But hard by St. Paul’s, the cathedral of Anglicanism, is Printing House Square, the cathedral of Journalism, and in it hangs a bell to which Great Tom of Lincoln, Peter of York, the Kolokol of Moscow, and our own defunct “Big Ben,” are but as tinkling muffineers. For though the sides of the bell are only paper, the clapper is the great public tongue; the booming sound that fills the city every morning, and, to use the words of Mr. Walter Whitman, “utters its barbaric youp over the house-tops of creation,” is the great Public Voice. Bottle up your animosities, then, stifle your prejudices, and come and hear the voice’s first faint murmur at five o’clock in the morning.

The office of the “Times” and “Evening Mail” is, as all civilised men should know, situated in Printing House Square and Playhouse Yard, in the parish of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, in the city of London. Now this is very pleasant and comfortable information, and is fit matter for a studious man to lay to heart; and there exists but one little drawback to mar the felicity which one must naturally feel at having the style and title of the press’s great champions’ _habitat_ so patly at one’s fingers’ ends. The drawback—the kink in the cable, the hyssop in the wine-cup, the thorn to the rose—is that, with the exception of Honey Lane market and Little Chester Street, Pimlico, Printing House Square is the most difficult locality to find in all London. It is not much use asking your way to it; a map of London, however elaborate, would not be of the slightest assistance to you in discovering it: it will avail you little even to be told that it is close to Apothecaries’ Hall, for where, I should like to know, is that huge musty caravanserai of drugs, and who is to find it at a short notice? And the intimation that Printing House Square is not far from Puddle Dock, would not, I opine, render you great service, intimate as might be your acquaintance with the shores of the river, both above and below bridge, and would be scarcely more lucid a direction than the intimation that the London terminus of the South-Western Railway was close to Pedlars’ Acre. The “Times” newspaper is somewhere near all these places; and it is likewise within a stone’s throw from Ludgate Hill, and not far from St. Paul’s, and within a minute’s walk of Fleet Street, and contiguous to Blackfriars Bridge, close handy to Earl Street, and no great distance from Chatham Place. Yet, for all this, the “Times” office might be, to the uninitiated, just as well placed in the centre of the Cretan labyrinth, or the maze at Hampton Court, or the budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The best way to reach the office is to take any turning to the south side of London Bridge, or the east of Bridge Street, Blackfriars, and then trust to chance. The probabilities are varied. Very likely you will find yourself entangled in a seemingly hopeless net-work of narrow streets; you will be jostled into chandlers’ shops, vilified by boys unctuous, black, and reeking from the printing-machine; pursued by costermongers importuning you to purchase small parcels of vegetables; and, particularly after sundown, your life will be placed in jeopardy by a Hansom cab bouncing up or down the narrow thoroughfare, of course on its way to the “Times” office, and on an errand of life and death; the excited politician inside, frantically offering the cabman (he, even, doesn’t know the way to the “Times,” and has just asked it of a grimy cynic, smoking a pipe in front of a coal and potato shed) extra shillings for speed. The grimy cynic, perhaps from sheer malevolence of disposition, perhaps from the ruffling of his temper naturally incidental to his being asked the same question about five hundred times every day, answers morosely that he believes the Hoffice is in Bummondsey, but he’s blest if he knows hanything more about it. He will have bad times of it, that grimy cynic, I perpend, for telling such fibs. Still struggle on manfully, always like the nautical gentleman in the blue pilot jacket who had had so many domestic afflictions, and exhorted the passenger to “go down, go down.” Never mind the regiments of gallinacea that board in the gutter and lodge in the adjacent coal-cellars, and peck at your feet as though they could relish your corns. Never mind the infants of tender years who come tumbling between your legs, sprawl, howling, at your feet, and cast around appealing glances, which draw cries of “shame!” from vengeful family-men who have never set eyes on you before, but who evidently regard you as a peripatetic ogre, going about, of malice prepense, to trip up children. Never mind the suffocating odour of second-hand fish, vegetables, fruit, coal-dust, potato sacks, the adjacent gasworks, gum-benzoin, hartshorn, opium, and other medicaments from Apothecaries’ Hall. Never mind the noises of dogs barking, of children that are smacked by their parents or guardians for crying, and then, of course, roar louder; of boys yelling the insufferable “Old Dog Tray,” the abominable “Keemo Kimo,” the hideous “Hoomtoomdoodendoo,” and rattling those abhorrent instruments of discord, the “bones;” of women scolding, quarrelling, or shrieking domestic calumnies of Mrs. Armstrong in connection with Bill Boosker, nicknamed the “Lively Flea,” from garret-windows across the street; of men growling, and wagon-wheels rumbling, and from distant forges the yell of the indignant anvil as the ruthless hammer smites it, and the great bar of iron is beaten flat, the sparks flying up, rejoicing in a red “ha-ha!” at the ferruginous defeat. Never mind the dangers of hoop, “hopscotch,” “fly-the-garter,” “thread-the-needle,” “trip-the-baker,” “tipcat,” and “shove-halfpenny,” for the carrying out of which exciting and amusing games the juvenile population entirely monopolise what spare strips of pavement there are. Trust on, be not afraid, keep struggling; and it is five hundred to one that you will eventually turn up Printing House Square, over against the “Times” office. How ever the leviathan of the press manages to breathe in this close, stifling, elbow-hampering neighbourhood, has always puzzled me, and has puzzled, I daresay, a great many wiser than I. How do the archbishops in their coaches and six (it is well known that those gorgeous prelates write the leading articles, carrying the necessary stationery in their mitres, and wiping their pens on their black silk aprons—the B—p of O—x—d, however, always writes with a pastoral crozier, dipped in milk and honey, or a lamb’s fleece—and come down to the office at a quarter past nine every evening to correct their proofs) contrive to squeeze their broad-shouldered equipages through these bye-lanes? How can the sub-editor’s four-in-hand pass, the city correspondent’s comfortable yellow chariot, nay, even the modest broughams of the compositors? Why does not the “Times” burst forth from the shell it has grown too large for, and plant its standard on the hill of Ludgate, or by the side of Cheap,—if it must needs be in the city? The area of Lincoln’s Inn Fields would be perhaps the most suitable locality for a new office; but it is indubitable that unless the “leading journal” retrogress and contract its operation, they will have, some day, to pull down the choking little nests of back-streets which surround and hem it in, even as they had to pull down the wall of the dock, bodily, in order to let the _Great Britain_ steam-ship out.

What a contrast sequestered Printing House Square, with its old-fashioned aspect, its quiet, dingy-looking houses, its clump of green trees within a railing to the left, presents to the gurgling, gasping neighbourhood which stands in such close propinquity to it! Here is the great brainpan of journalism; the centre of newspaper activity, the prefecture of police of the public press. Absolutely necessary is it that it should be entirely a secret police, the “awful, shadowy, irresponsible, and yet _puissant_ we” should dominate over the columns of the daily journal. Will a time ever come, I wonder, when a man will sign his own articles in a newspaper; receive his reward for honesty, his censure for tergiversation, from the public? Will a strange day of revolution ever arrive, when the mystic “we” shall be merged into the responsible, tax-paying, tangible, palpable, shootable, suicidable, and kickable “I?” Perhaps never; perhaps such a consummation would be disastrous. Old Cobbett, in one of his screeds of passionate contempt in his “gridiron” paper the “Register,” once said that he should like to have all the newspaper editors and correspondents in London assembled in Hyde Park, in order that from their personal appearance the public might judge by what a disreputable-looking set of fellows they were hoodwinked and nose-led. There would be no need to hold such a gathering in this scene-painting age. Walk but into any fashionable photographic studio, and you shall find all the “sommités” of the press neatly collectionised, and stuck on pasteboard in the show-room portfolio; and if you entreat the photographer’s pretty wife civilly, she will point out to you Doctor Copperbolt of the “Thunderer,” and Bill Hornblower of the “Penny Trumpet,” in their habit as they live.

Printing House Square is to me interesting at all times of the day and night. In the afternoon, the dullest period of its existence, when the compositors are gone away, the editors not come, the last number of the last edition of the day’s sheet printed, and the mighty steam-engine for a time hushed, I wander into its precincts often; make some small pretexts of taking out a slip of paper, and wending my way towards the advertising department; but soon retrace my steps, and, to tell the truth, moon about the square in such a suspicious and prowling manner, that if they kept any spoons on the premises, I should most probably be ordered off by the compositor on duty. This was Playhouse Yard too, once, was it—nay, is still; but where is the old playhouse—the Globe Theatre, Blackfriars, if I mistake not? Not a vestige, not a particle remains. The fourth estate has swallowed it all up. The Press Dragon of Wantley has devoured everything; and the “Times” seems omnipotent in its home by Puddle Dock. Look over the door of the advertisement office. Above that portal is a handsome marble slab, a votive tablet, in commemoration of a great victory the “Times” once gained, not a legal victory, but one of power and influence with the people, and especially with the commercial community, by its exposure, anent the trial of Bogle _v._ Lawson, of the most extensive and remarkable fraudulent conspiracy ever brought to light in the mercantile world. The “Times” refused to be reimbursed for the heavy costs with which its proprietors had been saddled in defending the action brought by Mr. Bogle, a banker at Florence, against the publisher of the “Times,” Mr. Lawson. But a subscription, amounting to £2,700, had been raised, and this handsome sum, which the “Times” proprietors refused to accept, was at last laid out in the foundation of two scholarships at Christ’s Hospital and the City of London School, for the benefit of pupils of those institutions proceeding to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Do you remember—are you old enough to remember—the famous case of Bogle _versus_ Lawson, reader? It would take me five times the space I can spare for this paper to give you even the outline of the history of the monstrous fraud from which that action grew. Suffice it now to say, that Mr. Bogle had been mixed up—it has been since established innocently—in the great continental letter of credit forging system, invented, carried out, and pursued with consummate success by an accomplished scoundrel, the Marquis de Bourbel, who, when the felonious bubble at length burst, and the fraud was detected, was in nowise cast down or abashed by that discovery that had come, and the punishment that seemed imminent, but with admirable strategy called in his outlying pickets of countesses, actresses—_demi-monde_ adventuresses—couriers, and sham English milords, who had been scouring the Continent changing his forged letters of credit, and, after the unutterable impudence of an appearance in court during the “Times” trial, gracefully retired into private life. I, the scribe, _moi qui vous parle_, have lived in the same house with this great man. It was at a hairdresser’s shop in the Regent’s Quadrant, and in an upper chamber of the house in question did the gallant marquis, assisted by a distinguished countess, who had formerly danced on stilts, and an English copper-plate engraver, work off the proofs of his wicked paper money from the counterfeited plates. I should like to know what became eventually of the Marquis de Bourbel: whether his lordship was, in the ripeness of his time, guillotined, garotted, hanged, or knouted. I go for Siberia and the knout, for, from the peculiar conformation of his lordship’s character, I don’t think it possible that he could have refrained for long from forgery. We should have heard of him, I think, had he come to grief in Western Europe; but Russian bank-notes are very easy to forge, and Russian prisons and prisoners are seldom brought before the public eye. They manage those little things better, and keep them nice and cozy and quiet; and so I go for Siberia and the knout.

It is, however, as the shades of evening gather round the _Cour des Miracles_ which encompasses the “Times” office, that the scene which it and the Square present becomes more interesting. For early in the evening that giant steam-engine begins to throb, and, as the hour advances, the monster is fed with reams on reams of stout white paper, which he devours as though they were so many wafers.[1] It gets late at Printing House Square; the sub-editors have been for some time in their rooms; the ineffable mysteries of the “Times”—editors, proprietors, cabinet ministers, lord chancellors, generals of the Jesuits, for aught I know, have arrived from their clubs in broughams and in cabs. Who shall tell? That stout good-humoured looking gentleman with the umbrella and the ecclesiastical neckcloth, may be the writer of the comic leading articles, just arrived with his copy. No; he has vainly tried the door of the advertisement office, which is closed. Perhaps he is only X. Y. Z., who, in the second column, entreats P. Q. R. to return to his disconsolate parents; or the inventor of some new tooth-powder with a Greek name, or the discoverer of the “fourteen shilling trousers.” It is getting later, and the windows of the great office are all blazing with gas. The steam-engine not only throbs; it pants, it groans, it puffs, it snorts, it bursts into a wild, clanging pæan of printing. Sub-editors are now hard at work cutting down “flimsy,” ramming sheets of “copy” on files, endlessly conferring with perspiring foremen. Ineffable mysteries (I presume) are writing terribly slaughtering articles in carpeted rooms, by the light of Argand lamps. Do they have cake and wine, I wonder, in those rooms? Sherry and sandwiches, perhaps, and on field-nights lobsters. It is getting later, but there is no sign of diminution yet in the stream of cabs that drive into the Square. Every one who is in debt, and every one who is in difficulties, and everybody who fancies that he, or any friend, relation, or connection of his, has a grievance, and can put pen to paper, four letters together in orthography and four words in syntax, must needs write a letter to the “Times;” and of the metropolitan correspondents of that journal, the immense majority themselves bring their letters down to the office, thinking, haply, that they might meet the editor standing “promiscuous” on the door-step, and after some five minutes’ button-holding, secure, irrevocably, the insertion of their communications. I don’t at all envy the gentleman whose duty it is to open and read (do they read them all?) the letters addressed to the editor of the “Times”. What quires of insane complaints, on matters running from the misdelivery of a letter to the misgovernment of India, from the iniquities of the income-tax to an overcharge for a sandwich in a country inn, that editor must have to wade through; what reams of silly compliments about “your influential journal,” and “your world-known paper,” he must have to read, and grin in his sleeve at! What a multitudinous army, what a Persian host, these correspondents must be! Who are they?—the anonymous ones—what are they like? Who is “Verax?” who “Paterfamilias?” who “Indophilus?” who “The London Scoundrel?” who “A Thirsty Soul?” When will Mr. Herbert Watkins photograph me a collection of portraits of “Constant Readers,” “Englishmen,” and “Hertfordshire Incumbents?” Where is the incumbency of that brilliant writer? Who is “_Habitans in Sicco_,” and how came he first to date from the “Broad Phylactery?” and where does “Jacob Omnium” live when he is at home? I should like to study the physiognomy of these inveterate letter writers; to be acquainted with the circumstances which first led them to put pen to paper in correspondence with the “Times;” to know how they like to see themselves in print, and also how they feel, when, as happens with lamentable frequency, their lucubrations don’t get printed at all.

It is getting later and later, oh! anxious waiters for to-morrow’s news. The “Times” has its secrets by this time. State secrets, literary secrets, secrets artistic and dramatic; secrets of robbery, and fire, and murder—it holds them all fast now, admitting none to its confidence but the Ineffables, the printers, and the ever-throbbing steam-engine; but it will divulge its secrets to millions at five o’clock to-morrow morning. Later and later still. The last report from the late debate in the Commons has come in; the last paragraph of interesting news, dropped into the box by a stealthy penny-a-liner, has been eliminated from a mass of flimsy on its probation, and for the most part rejected; the foreign telegrams are in type; the slaughtering leaders glare in their “chases,” presaging woe and disaster to ministers to-morrow; the last critic, in a white neckcloth, has hurried down with his column and a-half on the last new spectacle at the Princess’s; or has, which very frequently happens, despatched that manuscript from the box at the “Albion,” where he has been snugly supping, bidding the messenger hasten, and giving him to procure a cab the sum of one extra shilling, which that messenger never by any chance expends in vehicular conveyance, but runs instead with the art-criticism, swift as the timid roe, so swift indeed, that policemen are only deterred through chronic laziness from pursuing and asking whether he hasn’t been stealing anything. By this time the “Times” has become tight and replete with matter, as one who has dined well and copiously. Nothing is wanting: city correspondence, sporting intelligence, markets, state of the weather, prices of stocks and railway shares, parliamentary summary, law and police reports, mysterious advertisements, and births, deaths, and marriages. Now let the nations wonder, and the conductors of the mangy little continental fly-sheets of newspapers hide their heads in shame, for the “Times”—the mighty “Times”—has “gone to bed.” The “forms,” or iron-framed and wedged-up masses of type, are, in other words, on the machine; and, at the rate of twelve thousand an hour, the damp broad sheets roll from the grim iron instrument of the dissemination of light throughout the world.

At five o’clock a.m., the first phase of the publication of the “Times” newspaper commences. In a large bare room—something like the receiving ward of an hospital—with a pay counter at one end, and lined throughout with parallel rows of bare deal tables, the “leading journal” first sees the light of publicity. The tables are covered with huge piles of newspapers spread out the full size of the sheet. These are, with dazzling celerity, folded by legions of stout porters, and straightway carried to the door, where cabs, and carts, and light express phæton-like vehicles, are in readiness to convey them to the railway stations. The quantity of papers borne to the carriages outside by the stout porters seems, and truly is, prodigious; but your astonishment will be increased when I tell you that this only forms the stock purchased every morning by those gigantic newsagents, Messrs. Smith and Son, of the Strand. As the largest consumers, the “Times” naturally allows them a priority of supply, and it is not for a considerable period after they have received their orders that the great body of newsagents and newsvenders—the “trade,” as they are generically termed—are admitted, grumbling intensely, to buy the number of quires or copies which they expect to sell or lend that day. The scene outside then becomes one of baffling noise and confusion. There is a cobweb of wheeled vehicles of all sorts, from a cab to a hybrid construction something between a wheelbarrow and a costermonger’s shallow. There is much bawling and flinging, shoving, hoisting, pulling and dragging of parcels; all the horses’ heads seem to be turned the wrong way; everybody’s off-wheel seems locked in somebody else’s; but the proceedings on the whole are characterised by much good-humour and some fun. The mob of boys—all engaged in the news-trade—is something wonderful: fat boys, lean boys, sandy-haired and red-haired boys, tall boys and short boys, boys with red comforters (though it is summer), and boys with sacks on their backs and money-bags in their hands; boys with turn-down collars; and boys whose extreme buttonedupness renders the fact of their having any shirts to put collars to, turn-down or stuck-up, grievously problematical. Hard-working boys are these juvenile Bashi-Bazouks of the newspaper trade. And I am glad to observe, for the edification of social economists, with scarcely an exception, very honest boys. I don’t exactly say that they are trusted with untold gold, but of the gold that is told, to say nothing of the silver and copper, they give a generally entirely satisfactory account. At about half-past seven the cohorts of newsvenders, infantry and cavalry, gradually disperse, and the “Times” is left to the agonies of its second edition.

As you walk away from Printing House Square in the cool of the morning, and reflect, I hope with salutary results, upon the busy scene you have witnessed, just bestow one thought, and mingle with it a large meed of admiration, for the man who, in his generation, truly made the “Times” what it is now—John Walter, of Bearwood, Member of Parliament. Foul-mouthed old Cobbett called him “Jack Walters,” and him and his newspaper many ungenteel names, predicting that he should live to see him “earthed,” and to “spit upon his grave;” but he survived the vituperative old man’s coarse epithets. He put flesh on the dry bones of an almost moribund newspaper. He, by untiring and indomitable energy and perseverance, raised the circulation of the “Times” twenty-fold, and put it in the way of attaining the gigantic publicity and popularity which it has now achieved. It is true that Mr. Walter realised a princely fortune by his connection with the “Times,” and left to his son, the present Mr. John Walter, M.P., a lion’s share in the magnificent inheritance he had created. But he did much solid good to others besides himself. This brave old pressman, who, when an express came in from Paris—the French king’s speech to the Chambers in 1835—and when there were neither contributors nor compositors to be found at hand, bravely took off his coat, and in his shirt-sleeves first translated, and then, taking “a turn at case,” proceeded to set up in type his own manuscript. Mr. Walter was one of the pioneers of liberal knowledge; and men like him do more to clear the atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice, than whole colleges full of scholiasts and dialecticians.

SIX O’CLOCK A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET.

An Emperor will always be called Cæsar, and a dog “poor old fellow,” in whatever country they may reign or bark, I suppose; and I should be very much surprised if any men of Anglo-Saxon lineage, from this time forward to the millennium, could build a new city in any part of either hemisphere without a street or streets named after certain London localities, dear and familiar to us all. There is a Pall Mall in Liverpool, though but an unsavoury little thoroughfare, and a Piccadilly in Manchester—a very murky, bricky street indeed, compared with that unequalled hill of London, skirted on one side by the mansions of the nobles, and on the other by the great green parks. Brighton has its Bond Street—_mutatus ab ille_, certainly, being a fourth-rate skimping little place, smelling of oyster-shells, sand, recently-washed linen, and babies. I question not but in far-off Melbourne and Sydney, and scarcely yet planned cities of the Bush, the dear old names are springing up, like shoots from famous trees. Antipodean legislators have a refreshment room they call “Bellamy’s;” merchants in far-off lands have their “Lloyd’s;” there are coffee-houses and taverns, thousands of miles away, christened “Joe’s,” and “Tom’s,” and “Sam’s,” though the original “Joe,” the primeval “Tom,” the first “Sam,” most bald-headed and courteous of old port-wine-wise waiters, have long since slept the sleep of the just in quiet mouldy London graveyards, closed years ago by the Board of Health. On very many names, and names alone, we stamp _esto perpetua_; and English hearts would ill brook the alteration of their favourite designations. Long, long may it be, I hope, before the great Lord Mayor of London shall be called the Prefect of the Thames, or the Secretary of State for the Home Department be known as the Minister of the Interior!

Foremost among names familiar to British mouths is Covent Garden. The provincial knows it; the American knows it; Lord Macaulay’s New Zealander will come to meditate among the moss-grown arcades, when he makes that celebrated sketching excursion we have so long been promised. To the play-goer Covent Garden is suggestive of the glories of Kemble and Siddons; old book-a-bosom studious men, who live among musty volumes, remember that Harry Fielding wrote the “Covent Garden Journal;” that Mr. Wycherley lived in Bow Street; and that Mr. Dryden was cudgelled in Rose Street hard by. Politicians remember the _fasti_ of the Westminster election, and how Mr. Sheridan, beset by bailiffs on the hustings, escaped through the churchyard. Artists know that Inigo Jones built that same church of St. Paul, in compliance with the mandate of his patron, the Earl of Bedford. “Build me a barn,” said the Earl. Quoth Inigo, “My lord, I will build you the handsomest barn in England;” and the church is in the market to this day, with its barn-like roof, to see. Old stagers who have led jovial London lives, have yet chuckling memories of how in Covent Garden they were wont to hear the chimes at midnight in the days when they were eating their terms, and lay over against the “Windmill” in Moorfields, and consorted with the Bona Robas. Those days, Sir John Falstaff—those days, Justice Shallow, shall return no more to you. There was the “Finish,”—a vulgar, noisy place enough; but stamped with undying gentility by the patronage of his late Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. Great George “finished” in Covent Garden purlieus; Major Hanger told his stories, Captain Morris sang his songs, there. In a peaceable gutter in front of the “Finish,” Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Esq., M.P., lay down overtaken in foreign wines, and told the guardian of the night that his name was Wilberforce. A wild place, that “Finish;” yet a better one than Great George’s other “Finish” at Windsor, with the actress to read plays to him, the servants anxious for him to quit the stage, that they might sell his frogged, furred coats, and white kid pantaloons: the sorry end in a mean chair—unfriended, unloved, save by hirelings deserted. When the Hope of England is old enough to wear on his fair head the coronal and the three ostrich feathers, will _he_ patronise a “Finish?” shall we have another wild young Prince and Poins, I wonder. To be sure, Mr. Thackeray tells us that the young nobles of the present age have “Spratts” and the “back kitchen” to finish up a night in; but, pshaw! the Hope of England takes the chair at the Royal Institution to hear Mr. Faraday lecture, and sits on the bench beside John Lord Campbell to see rogues tried.

Covent Garden is a very chain, and its links are pleasant reminiscences. They are somewhat dangerous to me, for my business is not antiquarian, nor even topographical, just now; and I have but to do with the sixth hour of the morning, and the vegetable market that is held in the monks’ old garden. I will dismiss the noble house of Bedford, though Covent Garden, &c., are the richest appanage of that ducal entity—simply recording a wish that you or I, my friend, had one tithe of the fat revenues that ooze from between the bricks of the Bedford estate. You should not dig, nor I delve, then. We would drink brown ale, and pay the reckoning on the nail, and no man for debt should go to jail, that we could help, from Garryowen to glory. I will say nothing to you of the old theatre: how it was burnt again and again, and always re-appeared, with great success on the part of Phœnix. Of Bow Street, even, will I be silent, and proffer nought of Sir Richard Birnie, or that famed runner, Townsend. Nor of the Garrick Club, in King Street, will I discourse; indeed, I don’t know that I am qualified to say anything pertinent respecting that establishment. I am not a member of the club; and I am afraid of the men in plush, who, albeit aristocratic, have yet a certain “Garrick” look about them, and must be, I surmise, the prosperous brothers of the “green-coats” who sweep and water the stage, and pick up Sir Anthony Absolute’s hat and crutch in the play. And scant dissertations shall you have from me on those dim days of old, when Covent Garden was in verity the garden of a convent; when matins and vespers, complins and benedictions, were tinkled out in mellow tintinnabulations through the leafy aisles of fruit trees; when my Lord Abbot trod the green sward, stately, his signet-ring flashing in the evening sun; and Brother Austin hated Friar Lawrence, and cursed him softly as he paced the gravel walks demurely, his hands in his brown sleeves, his eyes ever and anon cast up to count the peaches on the wall. Solemn old conventual days, with shrill-voiced choir-boys singing from breves and minims as big as latch-keys, scored in black and red on brave parchment music-tomes. Lazy old conventual days, when the cellarer brewed October that would give Messrs. Bass and Allsopp vertigo; when the poor were fed with a manchet and stoup at the gate, without seeking the relieving officer, or an order for the stoneyard. Comfortable old days, when the Abbot’s _venator_ brought in a fat buck from Sheen or Chertsey, the _piscator_ fresh salmon (the water-drops looked like pearls on their silvery backs). Comfortable old days of softly-saddled palfreys, venison pasties, and Malvoisie, sandalled feet, and shaven crowns, bead-telling, and censor-swinging. These were the days of the lazy monks in their Covent Garden. Lazy! They were lazy enough to illuminate the exquisitely beautiful missals and books of hours you may see in the British Museum; to feed, and tend, and comfort the poor, and heal them when they were sick; to keep art and learning from decay and death in a dark age; to build cathedrals, whose smallest buttress shall make your children’s children, Sir Charles Barry, blush; but they were the lazy monks—so let us cry havoc upon them. They were shavelings. They didn’t wash their feet, they aided and abetted Guy Fawkes, Ignatius Loyola, and the Cardinal Archbishop of ——.

It is six o’clock on a glorious summer’s morning; the lazy monks fade away like the shadows of the night, and leave me in Covent Garden, and in high market. Every morning during the summer may be called market morning; but in the winter the special mornings are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. It is a strange sight then in the winter blackness to see the gas glimmering among huge piles of vegetables hoisted high on carts, and slowly moving like Birnam Woods coming to a Dunsinane of marketdom. When the snow is on the ground, or when the rain it raineth, the glare of lights and black shadows; the rushing figures of men with burdens; the great heaving masses of baskets that are tumbled from steep heights; the brilliantly-lighted shops in the grand arcade, where, winter or summer, glow the oranges and the hot-house fruits and flowers; all these make up a series of pictures, strange and sometimes almost terrible. There are yawning cellars, that vomit green stuff; there are tall potato-sacks, propped up in dark corners, that might contain corpses of murdered men; there are wondrous masses of light and shade, and dazzling effects of candlelight, enough to make old Schkalken’s ghost rise, crayon and sketch-book in hand, and the _eidolon_ of Paul Rembrandt to take lodgings in the Piazza, over against the market.

But six o’clock in the glorious summer time! The London smoke is not out of bed yet, and indeed Covent Garden market would at all times seem to possess an exemption from over fumigation. If you consider the fronts of the houses, and the arches of the Piazza, you will see that though tinted by age, they have not that sooty grimness that degrades St. Paul’s cathedral into the similitude of a temple dedicated to the worship of the goddess of chimney-sweepers, and makes the East India House (what will they do with the India House when the directors are demolished?) look like the outside of the black-hole at Calcutta. Smoke has been merciful to Covent Garden market, and its cornucopia is not as dingy as a ramoneur’s sack. All night long the heavily-laden wagons—mountains of cabbages, cauliflowers, brocoli, asparagus, carrots, turnips, and seakale; Egyptian pyramids of red-huddled baskets full of apples and pears, hecatombs of cherries, holocausts of strawberry pottles, chair wicker bosoms crimsoned by sanguinolent spots; and above all, piles, heaps—Pelions on Ossas, Atlases on Olympuses, Chimborazos on Himalayas, Mount Aboras on Mont Blancs—of PEAS, have been creaking and rumbling and heavily wheezing along suburban roads, and through the main streets of the never-sleeping city. You heard those broad groaning wheels, perturbed man, as your head tossed uneasily on the pillow, and you thought of the bill that was to come due on the morrow. You too heard them, pretty maiden, in the laced night cap, as you bedewed that delicate border of dentelle with tears, coursing from the eyes which should have been closed in sleep two hours since, tears evoked by the atrocious behaviour of Edward (a monster and member of the Stock Exchange) towards Clara (a designing, wicked, artful thing, whose papa lives in Torrington Square) during the last _deux temps_. That dull heavy sound was distinct above the sharp rattle of the night cabmen’s wheels; the steady revolving clatter of the home-returning brougham: for the sound of wheels in London are as the waves of a sea that is never still. The policemen met the market wagons as they trudged along, and eyed them critically, as though a neat case of lurking about with intent to commit a felony might be concealed in a strawberry-pottle, or a drunk and incapable lying perdu in a pea-basket. Roaring blades, addicted to asserting in chorus that they would not go home till morning—a needless vaunt, for it was morning already—hailed the bluff-visaged market carters, interchanged lively jocularities with them bearing on the syrup giving rhubarb and the succulent carrot, and lighted their pipes at the blackened calumets of the vegetarians. Young Tom Buffalo, who had been out at a christening party at Hammersmith, and had made the welkin ring (whatever and wherever the welkin may be, and howsoever the process of making it ring be effected) met a gigantic cabbage-chariot, as home returning, precisely at that part of Knightsbridge where Old Padlock House used to stand, and struck a bargain with the charioteer for conveyance to Charing Cross, for fourpence, a libation of milk, qualified by some spirituous admixture, and a pipeful of the best Bristol bird’s-eye. And so from all outlying nursery-grounds and market-gardens about London: from Brompton, Fulham, Brentford, Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Kew; from sober Hackney, and Dalston, and Kingsland, bank-clerk beloved; from Tottenham, and Edmonton, sacred to John Gilpin, his hat and wig; from saintly Clapham and Brixton, equally interested in piety, sugar-baking, and the funds, come, too heavy to gallop, too proud to trot, but sternly stalking in elephantine dignity of progression, the great carts bound to Covent Garden. One would think that all the vegetable-dishes in the world would not be able to hold the cabbage, to say nothing of the other verdant esculents.

Delude not yourself with the notion that the market-carts alone can bring, or the suburban market-gardens furnish, a sufficient quantity of green meat for the great, insatiable, hungry, ravenous monster that men call (and none know why) London. Stand here with me in Covent Garden market-place, and let your eyes follow whither my finger points. Do you see those great vans, long, heavily-built, hoisted on high springs, and with immense wheels—vans drawn by horses of tremendous size and strength, but which, for all their bulk and weight, seem to move at a lightning pace compared with the snail crawl of the ancient market-carts? Their drivers are robust men, fresh-coloured, full-whiskered, strong-limbed, clad in corduroy shining at the seams, with bulging pockets, from which peep blotting-paper, interleaved books of invoices, and parcels receipts. They are always wiping their hot foreheads with red cotton pocket-handkerchiefs. They are always in such a hurry. They never can wait. Alert in movement, strong in action, hardy in speech, curt and quick in reply, setting not much store by policemen, and bidding the wealthiest potatoe salesman “look sharp;” these vigorous mortals discharge from their vans such a shower of vegetable missiles that you might almost fancy the bombardment of a new Sebastopol. “Troy,” the old ballad tells us, “had a breed of stout bold men;” but these seem stouter and bolder. And they drive away, these stalwart, bold-spoken varlets, standing erect in their huge vans, and adjuring, by the name of “slow coach,” seemingly immoveable market-carts to “mind their eye;” wearing out the London macadam with their fierce wheels, to the despair of the commissioners of paving (though my private opinion is, that the paving commissioners like to see the paving worn out, in order that they may have the “street up” again); threading their way in a surprisingly dexterous though apparently reckless manner through the maze of vehicles, and finding themselves, in an astonishingly short space of time, in Tottenham Court Road, and Union Street, Borough. What gives these men their almost superhuman velocity, strength, confidence? They do but carry cabbages, like other market-folk; but look on the legends inscribed on these vans, and the mystery is at once explained. “Chaplin and Home,” “Pickford and Co.,” railway carriers. These vegetable Titans are of the rail, and raily. They have brought their horns of plenty from the termini of the great iron roads. Carts and carts, trucks and trucks have journeyed through the dense night, laden with vegetable produce; locomotives have shrieked over Chatmoss, dragging cabbages and carrots after them; the most distant counties have poured the fatness of their lands at the feet of the Queen-city; but she, like the daughter of the horse-leech, still cryeth, “Give! give!” and, like Oliver Twist, “asks for more.” So they send her more, even from strange countries beyond the sea. Black steamers from Rotterdam and Antwerp belch forth volumes of smoke at the Tower stairs, and discharge cargoes of peas and potatoes. The Queen-city is an hungered, and must be fed; and it is no joke, I need scarcely tell you, to feed London. When the King of Siam has resolved upon the ruin of a courtier, he makes him a present of a white elephant. As the animal is thrice sacred in Siamese eyes, the luckless baillee, or garnishee, or possessor of the brute, dare neither sell, kill, nor neglect it; and the daily ration of rice, hay, and sugar which the albino monster devours, soon reduces the courtier to irremediable bankruptcy. Moral: avoid courts. If this were a despotic country, and her Majesty the Empress of Britain should take it into her head to ruin Baron Rothschild or the Marquis of Westminster (and indeed I have heard that the impoverished nobleman last mentioned is haunted by the fear of dying in a workhouse), I don’t think she could more easily effect her purpose than by giving him LONDON and bidding him feed it for a week.

Very sweet is the smell of the green peas this summer morning; and very picturesque is it to see the market-women ranged in circles, and busily employed in shelling those delicious edibles. Some fastidious persons might perhaps object that the fingers of the shellers are somewhat coarse, and that the vessels into which the peas fall are rudely fashioned. What does it matter? If we took this fastidiousness with us into an analysis of all the things we eat and drink, we should soon fill up the measure of the title of Dr. Culverwell’s book, by “avoiding” eating and drinking altogether. The delicate Havannah cigar has been rolled between the hot palms of oleaginous niggers; nay, some travellers declare, upon the bare thighs of sable wenches. The snowy lump-sugar has been refined by means of unutterable nastinesses of a sanguineous nature; the very daily bread we eat has, in a state of dough, formed the flooring for a vigorous polka, performed by journeymen bakers with bare feet. Food is a gift from heaven’s free bounty: take Sancho Panza’s advice, and don’t look the gift-horse in the mouth. He may have false teeth. We ought to be very much obliged, of course, to those disinterested medical gentlemen who formed themselves into a sanitary commission, and analysing our dinners under a microscope, found that one-half was poison, and the other half rubbish; but, for my part, I like anchovies to be red and pickles green, and I think that coffee without chicory in it is exceedingly nasty. As for the peas, I have so fond a love for those delicious pulse that I could partake of them even if I knew they had been shelled by Miss Julia Pastrana. I could eat the shucks; I have eaten them indeed in Russia, where they stew pea-shells in a sweet sauce, and make them amazingly relishing.

But sweeter even than the smell of the peas, and more delightful than the odour of the strawberries, is the delicious perfume of the innumerable flowers which crowd the north-western angle of the market, from the corner of King Street to the entrance of the grand avenue. These are not hot-house plants, not rare exotics; such do not arrive so soon, and their aristocratic purchasers will not be out of bed for hours. These are simply hundreds upon hundreds of flower-pots, blooming with roses and geraniums, with pinks and lilacs, with heartsease and fuschias. There are long boxes full of mignionette and jessamine; there are little pet vases full of peculiar roses with strange names; there are rose-trees, roots and all, reft from the earth by some floral Milo who cared not for the rebound. The cut flowers, too, in every variety of dazzling hue, in every gradation of sweet odour, are here, jewelling wooden boards, and making humble wicker-baskets iridescent. The violets have whole rows of baskets to themselves. Who is it that calls the violet humble, modest? He (I will call him he) is nothing of the sort. He is as bold as brass. He comes the earliest and goes away the latest of all his lovely companions; like a guest who is determined to make the most of a banquet. When the last rose of summer, tired of blooming alone, takes his hat and skulks home, the modest violet, who has been under the table for a great part of the evening, wakes up, and calls for another bottle of dew—and the right sort.

It seems early for so many persons to be abroad, not only to sell but to purchase flowers, yet there is no lack of buyers for the perfumed stores which meet the eye, and well nigh impede the footsteps. Young sempstresses and milliner’s girls, barmaids and shopwomen, pent up all day in a hot and close atmosphere, have risen an hour or two earlier, and make a party of pleasure to come to Covent Garden market to buy flowers. It is one of heaven’s mercies that the very poorest manage somehow to buy these treasures; and he who is steeped to the lips in misery will have a morsel of mignionette in his window, or a bunch of violets in a cracked jug on his mantelshelf, even as the great lady has rich, savage, blooming plants in her conservatory, and camelias and magnolias in porphyry vases on marble slabs. It is a thin, a very thin, line that divides the independent poor from the pauper in his hideous whitewashed union ward: the power of buying flowers and of keeping a dog. How the halfpence are scraped together to procure the violets or mignionette, whence comes the coin that purchases the scrap of paunch, it puzzles me to say: but go where you will among the _pauperum tabernas_ and you will find the dog and the flowers. Crowds more of purchasers are there yet around the violet baskets; but these are buyers to sell again. Wretched-looking little buyers are they, half-starved Bedouin children, mostly Irish, in faded and tattered garments, with ragged hair and bare feet. They have tramped miles with their scanty stock-money laid up in a corner of their patched shawls, daring not to think of breakfast till their purchases be made; and then they will tramp miles again through the cruel streets of London town, penetrating into courts and alleys where the sun never shines, peering into doorways, selling their wares to creatures almost as ragged and forlorn as themselves. They cry violets! They cried violets in good Master Herrick’s time. There are some worthy gentlemen, householders and ratepayers, who would put all such street-cries down by Act of Parliament. Indeed, it must an intolerable sin, this piping little voice of an eight-years old child, wheezing out a supplication to buy a ha’porth of violets. But then mouthy gentlemen are all Sir Oracles; and where they are, no dogs must bark nor violets be cried.