Chapter III: Part 3

It is past six o’clock, and high ’Change in the market. What gabbling! what shouting! what rushing and pushing! what confusion of tongues and men and horses and carts! The roadway of the adjacent streets is littered with fragments of vegetables. You need pick your way with care and circumspection through the crowd, for it is by no means pleasant to be tripped up by a porter staggering under a load of baskets, that look like a Leaning Tower of Pisa. Bow Street is blocked up by a triple line of costermongers’ “shallows,” drawn by woe-begone donkies; their masters are in the market purchasing that “sparrergrass” which they will so sonorously cry throughout the suburbs in the afternoon. They are also, I believe, to be put down by the worthy gentlemen who do not like noise. I wish they could put down, while they are about it, the chaffering of the money-changers in the temple, and the noise of the Pharisees’ brushes as they whiten those sepulchres of theirs, and the clanging of the bells that summon men to thank Heaven that they are not “as that publican,” and to burn their neighbour because he objects to shovel hats. King Street, Southampton Street, Russell Street, are full of carts and men. Early coffee-shops and taverns are gorged with customers, for the Covent Gardeners are essentially jolly gardeners, and besides, being stalwart men, are naturally hungry and athirst after their nights’ labour. There are public-houses in the market itself, where they give you hot shoulder of mutton for breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning! Hot coffee and gigantic piles of bread-and-butter disappear with astounding rapidity. Foaming tankards are quaffed, “nips” of alcohol “to keep the cold out” (though it is May) are tossed off; and among the hale, hearty, fresh-coloured market-people, you may see, here and there, some tardy lingerer at “the halls of dazzling light,” who has just crawled away from the enchanted scene, and, cooling his fevered throat with soda-water, or whipping up his jaded nerves with brandy and milk, fancies, because he is abroad at six o’clock in the morning, that he is “seeing life.” Crouching and lurking about, too, for anything they can beg, or anything they can borrow, or, I am afraid, for anything they can steal, are some homeless, shirtless vagabonds, who have slept all night under baskets or tarpaulins in the market, and now prowl in and out of the coffee-shops and taverns, with red eyes and unshaven chins. I grieve to have to notice such unsightly blots upon the Arcadia I have endeavoured to depict; but, alas! these things ARE! You have seen a caterpillar crawling on the fairest rose; and this glorious summer sun must have spots on its face. There are worse on London’s brow at six o’clock in the morning.

SEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.—A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN.

I know that the part which I have proposed to myself in these papers is that of a chronological Asmodeus; you, reader, I have enlisted, _nolens volens_, to accompany me in my flights about town, at all hours of the day and night; and you must, perforce, hold on by the skirts of my cloak as I wing my way from quarter to quarter of the immense city, to which the Madrid which the lame fiend showed his friend was but a nut-shell. And yet, when I look my self-appointed task in the face, I am astounded, humiliated, almost disheartened, by its magnitude. How can I hope to complete it within the compass of this book, within the time allotted for daily literary labour? For work ever so hard as we penmen may, and rob ever so many hours from sleep as you may choose to compute—as we are forced to do sometimes—that you may have your pabulum of printed matter, more or less amusing and instructive, at breakfast time, or at afternoon club reading hour, we must yet eat, and drink, and sleep, and go into the world soliciting bread or favours, we must quarrel with our wives, if married, and look out the things for the wash, if single—all of which are operations requiring a certain expenditure of time. We must, we authors, even have time, an’t please you, to grow ambitious, and to save money, stand for the borough, attend the board-room, and be appointed consuls-general to the Baratarian Islands. The old Grub Street tradition of the author is defunct. The man of letters is no longer supposed to write moral essays from Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet, to dine at twopenny ordinaries, and pass his leisure hours in night-cellars. Translators of Herodotus no longer lie three in a bed; nor is the gentleman who is correcting the proof-sheets of the Sanscrit dictionary to be found in a hay-loft over a tripe shop in Little Britain, or to be heard of at the bar of the Green Dragon. Another, and as erroneous, an idea of the author has sprung up in the minds of burgesses. He wears, according to some wiseacres, a shawl dressing-gown, and lies all day on a sofa, puffing a perfumed _narghilè_, penning paragraphs in violet ink on cream-laid paper at intervals; or he is a lettered Intriguer, who merely courts the Muses as the shortest way to the Treasury bench, and writes May Fair novels or Della Cruscan tragedies that he may the sooner become Prime Minister. There is another literary idea that may with greater reason become prevalent—that of the author-manufacturer, who produces such an amount of merchandise, takes it into the market, and sells it according to demand and the latest quotations, and the smoke of whose short cutty pipe, as he spins his literary yarn, is as natural a consequence of manufacture as the black cloud which gusts from Mr. Billyroller’s hundred-feet-high brick chimney as he spins _his_ yarns for madapolams and “domestics.” The author-manufacturer has to keep his books, to pay his men, to watch the course of the market, and to suit his wares to the prevailing caprice. And, like the cotton-spinner, he sometimes goes into the “Gazette,” paying but an infinitesimal dividend in the pound.

Did I not struggle midway into a phrase, some page or so since, and did it not waltz away from me on the nimble feet of a parenthesis? I fear that such was the case. How can I hope, I reiterate, to give you anything like a complete picture of the doings in London while still the clock goes round? I might take one house and unroof it, one street and unpave it, one man and disclose to you the secrets of twenty-four hours of his daily and nightly life; but it is London, in its entirety, that I have presumed to “time”—forgetting, oh! egregious and inconsistent!—that every minute over which the clock hand passes is as the shake of the wrist applied to a kaleidoscope, and that the whole aspect of the city changes with as magical rapidity.

I should be Briareus multiplied by ten thousand, and not Asmodeus at all, if I could set down in writing a tithe of London’s sayings and doings, acts and deeds, seemings and aspects, at seven o’clock in the morning. Only consider. Drumming with your finger on a map of the metropolis; just measure a few palms’ lengths, say from Camberwell Gate to the “Mother Redcap,” on the one hand—from Limehouse Church to Kensington Gravel Pits, on the other. Take the cubic dimensions, my dear sir; think of the mean area; rub up those mathematics, for proficiency in whose more recondite branches you so narrowly escaped being second wrangler, twenty years since; out with your logarithms, your conic sections, your fluxions, and calculate the thousands upon thousands of little dramas that must be taking place in London as the clock strikes seven. Let me glance at a few, as I travel with you towards that railway terminus which is our destination. Camberwell Gate: tollbar-keeper, who has been up all night, going to bed, very cross; tollbar-keeper’s wife gets up to mind the gate, also very cross. Woodendesk Grove, Grosvenor Park, Camberwell: Mr. Dockett, wharfage clerk in Messrs. Charter Party and Co.’s shipping house, Lower Thames Street, is shaving. He breakfasts at half-past seven, and has to be in the city by nine. Precisely at the same time that he is passing Mr. Mappin’s razor over his commercial countenance, Mr. Flybynight, aged twenty-two, also a clerk, but attached to the Lost-Monkey-and-Mislaid-Poodle-Department (Inland Revenue), Somerset House, lets himself into No. 7, Woodendesk Grove, next door to Mr. Dockett’s, by means of a Chubb’s key. Mr. Flybynight is in evening costume, considerably the worst for the concussion of pale ale bottle corks. On his elegant tie are the stains of the dressing of some lobster salad, and about half-a-pint of the crimson stream of life, formerly the joint property of Mr. Flybynight’s nose and of a cabman’s upper lip, both injured during a “knock-down and drag-out” fight, supervening on the disputed question of the right of a passenger to carry a live turkey (purchased in Leadenhall market) with him in a hackney cab. Mr. Flybynight has been to two evening parties, a public ball (admission sixpence), where he created a great sensation among the ladies and gentlemen present, by appearing with a lady’s cap on his head, a raw shoulder of mutton in one hand, and a pound of rushlights in the other; and to two suppers—one of roasted potatoes in Whitechapel High Street, the second of scolloped oysters in the Haymarket. He paid a visit to the Vine Street station-house, too, to clear up a misunderstanding as to a bell which was rung by accident, and a policeman’s hat which was knocked off by mistake. The inspector on duty was so charmed with Mr. Flybynight’s engaging demeanour and affable manners, that it was with difficulty that he was dissuaded from keeping him by him all night, and assigning him as a sleeping apartment a private parlour with a very strong lock, and remarkably well ventilated. He only consented to tear himself away from Mr. Flybynight’s society on the undertaking that the latter would convey home his friend Mr. Keepitup, who, though he persistently repeated to all comers that he was “all right,” appeared, if unsteadiness of gait and thickness of utterance were to be accepted as evidence, to be altogether wrong. Mr. Flybynight, faithful to his promise, took Mr. Keepitup (who was in the Customs) home; at least he took him as far as he would go—his own doorstep, namely, on which somewhat frigid pedestal he sat, informing the “milk,” a passing dustman, and a lady in pink, who had lost her way, and seemed to think that the best way to find it was to consult the pavement by falling prone thereupon every dozen yards or so—that though circumstances had compelled him to serve his country in a civil capacity, he was at heart and by predilection a soldier. In proof of which Mr. Keepitup struck his breast, volunteered a choice of martial airs, beginning with the “Death of Nelson,” and ending with a long howl, intermingled with passionate tears and ejaculations bearing reference to the infidelity of a certain Caroline, surname unknown, through whose cruelty he “would never be the same man again.” Mr. Flybynight, safely arrived at Woodendesk Grove, after these varied peripatetics, is due at the Lost-Monkey-and-Mislaid-Poodle Office at ten; but he will have a violent attack of lumbago this morning, which will unavoidably prevent him from reaching Somerset House before noon. His name will show somewhat unfavourably in the official book, and the Commissioners will look him up sharply, and shortly too, if he doesn’t take care. Mr. Keepitup, who, however eccentric may have been his previous nocturnal vagaries, possesses the faculty of appearing at the Custom-house gates as the clock strikes the half-hour after nine, with a very large and stiff shirt-collar, a microscopically shaven face, and the most irreproachable shirt, will go to work at his desk in the Long Room, with a steady hand and the countenance of a candidate for the Wesleyan ministry; but Mr. Flybynight will require a good deal of soda-water and sal-volatile, and perhaps a little tincture of opium, before he is equal to the resumption of his arduous duties. Wild lads, these clerks; and yet they don’t do such a vast amount of harm, Flybynight and Keepitup! They are very young; they don’t beat the town every night; they are honest lads at bottom, and have a contempt for meanness and are not lost to shame. They have not grown so vicious as to be ashamed and remorseful without any good resulting therefrom; and you will be astonished five years hence to see Keepitup high up in the Customs, and Flybynight married to a pretty girl, to whom he is the most exemplary of husbands. Let me edge in this little morsel of morality at seven o’clock in the morning. I know the virtue of steadiness, lectures, tracts, latch-key-prohibitions, strict parents, young men’s Christian associations, serious tea-parties and electrifying machines; but I have seen the world in my time, and its ways. Youth _will_ be youth, and youthful blood _will_ run riot. There is no morality so false as that which ignores the existence of immorality. Let us keep on preaching to the prodigals, and point with grim menace to the draff and husks, and the fatted calf which never shall be theirs if they do not reform; let us thunder against their dissipation, their late hours, their vain “larks,” their unseemly “sprees.” It is our duty; youth must be reproved, admonished, restrained by its elders. It has been so ever since the world began; but do not let us in our own hearts think every wild young man is bound hopelessly to perdition. Some there are, indeed, (and they are in evil case,) who have come to irremediable grief, and must sit aloof—spirits fallen never to rise again—and watch the struggling souls. But it must rejoice even those callous ones to see how many pecks of wild oats are sown every day, and what goodly harvests of home virtues and domestic joys are reaped on all sides, from the most unpromising soil. Let us not despair of the tendencies of the age. Young men will be young men, but they should be taught and led with gentle and wise counsels, with forbearance and moderation, to abandon the follies of youth, and to become staid and decorous. Flybynight, with such counsels, and good examples from his elders—ah, ye seniors! what examples are not due from you!—will leave off sack and live cleanly like a gentleman; and Keepitup will not bring his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.

Seven o’clock in the morning! I have already ventured a passing allusion to the “milk.” The poor little children who sell violets and water-cresses debouch from the great thoroughfares, and ply their humble trade in by-streets full of private houses. The newsvenders’ shops in the Strand, Holywell Street, and Fleet Street, are all in full activity. Legions of assistants crowd behind the broad counters, folding the still damp sheets of the morning newspapers, and, with fingers moving in swift legerdemain, tell off “quires” and “dozens” of cheap periodicals. If it happen to be seven o’clock, and a Friday morning, not only the doors of the great newsvenders—such as Messrs. Smith and Son and Mr. Vickers—but the portals of all the newspaper offices, will be crowded with newsmen’s carts and newsmen’s trucks; and from the gaping gates themselves will issue hordes of newsmen and flying cohorts of newsboys—boys with parcels, boys with bags, boys with satchels, men staggering under the weight of great piles of printed paper. Mercy on us! what a plethora of brainwork is about, and what a poor criterion of its quality the quantity manifestly affords! Yon tiny urchin with the red comforter has but half-a-dozen copies tucked beneath his arm of a journal sparkling with wit, and radiant in learning, and scathing in its satire, and Titanic in its vigour; yet, treading on his heels, comes a colossus in corduroy, eclipsed by a quadrangular mountain of closely-packed paper, quires—nay, whole reams—of some ragamuffin print, full of details of the last murder and abuse of some wise and good statesman because he happens to be a lord.

Seven, still seven! Potboys, rubbing their eyes, take down the shutters of taverns in leading thoroughfares, and then fall to rubbing the pewter pots till they assume a transcendent sheen. Within, the young ladies who officiate in the bar, and who look very drowsy in their curl-papers and cotton-print dresses, are rubbing the pewter counters and the brass-work of the beer-engines, the funnels and the whisky noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogany, cutting up the pork pies which Mr. Watling’s man has just left, displaying the Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal canopies. The early customers—matutinal _habitués_—drop in for small measures of cordials or glasses of peculiarly mild ale; and the freshest news of last night’s fire in Holborn, or last night’s division in the House, or last night’s opera at Her Majesty’s, are fished up from the columns of the “Morning Advertiser.” By intercommunication with the early customers, who all have a paternal and respectful fondness for her, the barmaid becomes _au courant_ with the news of the day. As a rule, the barmaid does not read the newspaper. On the second day of publication, she lends it to the dissenting washerwoman or the radical tailor in the court round the corner, who send small children, whose heads scarcely reach to the top of the counter, for it. When it is returned, she cuts it up for tobacco screws and for curl papers. I like the barmaid, for she is often pretty, always civil, works about fourteen hours a day for her keep and from eighteen to twenty pounds a year, is frequently a kinless orphan out of that admirable Licensed Victuallers’ School, and is, in nine cases out of ten, as chaste as Diana.

I should be grossly misleading you, were I to attempt to inculcate the supposition that at seven o’clock in the morning only the humbler classes, or those who have stopped up all night, are again up and doing. The Prime Minister is dressed, and poring over a savage leader in the “Times,” denouncing his policy, sneering at his latest measure, and insulting him personally in a facetious manner. The noble officers told off for duty of her Majesty’s regiment of Guards are up and fully equipped, though perchance they have spent the small hours in amusements not wholly dissimilar from those employed by the daring Flybynight and the intrepid Keepitup to kill time, and have devoted their vast energies to the absorbing requirements of morning parade. Many of the infant and juvenile scions of the aristocracy have left their downy couches ere this, and are undergoing a lavatory purgatory in the nursery. Many meek-faced, plainly-dressed young ladies, of native and foreign extraction, attached as governesses to the aristocratic families in question, are already in the school-room, sorting their pupils’ copy-books, or preparing for the early repetition of the music lesson, which is drummed and thrummed over in the morning pending the arrival of Signor Papadaggi or Herr Hammerer, who comes for an hour and earns a guinea. The governess, Miss Grissel, does not work more than twelve hours a day, and she earns perhaps fifty guineas a year against Papadaggi’s fifteen hundred and Hammerer’s two thousand. But then she is only a governess. Her life is somewhat hard, and lonely, and miserable, and might afford, to an ill-regulated mind, some cause for grumbling; but it is her duty to be patient, and not to repine. What says the pleasing poet?

“O! let us love our occupations,
Bless the squire and his relations,
Live upon our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations.”[2]

Let us trust Miss Grissel knows her proper station, and is satisfied.

Seven o’clock in the morning; but there are more governesses, and governesses out of bed, than Miss Grissel and her companions in woe, in the mansions of the nobility. Doctor Wackerbarth’s young gentlemen, from Towellem House, New Road, are gone to bathe at Peerless Pool, under escort of the writing-master. The Misses Gimps’ establishment for young ladies, at Bayswater, is already in full activity; and the eight and thirty boarders (among whom there are at present, and have been for the last ten years, two, and positively only two, vacancies. N.B.—The daughters of gentlemen only are received)—the eight and thirty boarders, in curl papers and brown Holland pinafores, are floundering through sloughs of despond in the endeavour to convey, in the English language, the fact that Calypso was unable to console herself for the departure of Ulysses; and into the French vernacular, the information that, in order to be disabused respecting the phantoms of hope and the whisperings of fancy, it is desirable to listen to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. In Charterhouse and Merchant Taylors’ and St. Paul’s, the boys are already at their lessons, and the cruel anger of Juno towards Æneas, together with the shameful conduct of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon, are matters of public (though unwilling) discussion; some private conversations going on surreptitiously, meanwhile, touching the price of alleytaws as compared with agates, and the relative merits of almond-rock and candied horehound. After all, the poor have their privileges—their immunities; and the couch of the rich is not altogether a bed of roses. Polly Rabbets, the charity girl, lies snugly in bed, while the honourable Clementina St. Maur is standing in the stocks, or is having her knuckles rapped for speaking English instead of French. Polly has a run in the Dials before breakfast, an expedition to buy a red herring for father, and perchance a penny for disbursement at the apple-stall. She is not wanted at school till nine. The most noble the Marquis of Millefleurs, aged ten, at Eton, has to rise at six; he is fag to Tom Tucker, the army clothier’s son. He has to clean his master’s boots, fry bacon, and toast bread for his breakfast. If he doesn’t know his lesson in school, the most noble the Marquis of Millefleurs is liable to be birched; but no such danger menaces Jemmy Allbones at the National, or Tommy Grimes at the Ragged School. If the schoolmaster were to beat them, their parents would have the _plagosus Orbilius_ up at the police-court in a trice, and the Sunday newspapers would be full of details of the “atrocious cruelty of a schoolmaster.”

One more peep at seven o’clock doings, and we will move further afield. Though sundry are up and doing, the great mass of London is yet sleeping. Sleeps the cosy tradesman, sleeps the linendraper’s shopman (till eight), sleeps the merchant, the dandy, the actor, the author, the _petite maitresse_. Hold fast while I wheel in my flight and hover over Pimlico. There is Millbank, where the boarders and lodgers, clad in hodden gray, with masks on their faces and numbers on their backs, have been up and stirring since six. And there, north-west of Millbank, is the palace, almost as ugly as the prison, where dwells the Great Governess of the Land. She is there, for you may see the standard floating in the morning breeze; and at seven in the morning, she, too, is up and doing. If she were at Osborne she would be strolling very likely on the white-beached shore, listening to the sea murmuring “your gracious Majesty,” and “your Majesty’s ever faithful subject and servant,” and “your petitioner will ever pray;” for it is thus doubtless that the obsequious sea has addressed sovereigns since Xerxes’ time. Or if the Imperial Governess were at Windsor, she might, at this very time, be walking on those mysterious Slopes on which it is a standing marvel that Royalty can preserve its equilibrium. When I speak of our gracious lady being awake and up at seven o’clock, I know that I am venturing into the realms of pure supposition; but remember I am Asmodeus, and can unroof palaces and hovels at will. Is it not, besides, a matter of public report that the Queen rises early? Does not the Court newsman (I wonder whether that occult functionary gets up early too) know it? Does not everybody know it—everybody say it? And what everybody says must be true. There are despatches to be read; private and confidential letters to foreign sovereigns to be written; the breakfasts, perchance, of the little princes and princesses to be superintended; the proofs, probably, of the last Royal etching or princely photograph to be inspected; a new pony to be tried in the riding-house; a new dog to be taught tricks: a host of things to do. Who shall say? What do we know about the daily life of royalty, save that it must be infinitely more laborious than that of a convict drudging through his penal servitude in Portland Prison? I met the carriage of H.R.H. the Prince Consort, with H.R.H. inside it, prowling about Pedlar’s Acre very early the other morning, going to or coming from, I presume, the South-Western Railway Terminus. When I read of her Majesty’s “arriving with her accustomed punctuality” at some rendezvous at nine o’clock in the morning, I can but think of and marvel at the amount of business she must have despatched before she entered her carriage. If there were to be (which heaven forfend!) a coronation to-morrow, the sovereign would be sure to arrive with his or her “accustomed punctuality;” yet how many hours it must take to try on the crown, to study the proper sweep of the imperial purple, to learn by heart that coronation oath which is never, never broken! For my part, I often wonder how kings and queens and emperors find time to go to bed at all.

So now, reader, not wholly, I trust, unedified by the cursory view we have taken of Babylon the Great in its seven-o’clock-in-the-morning phase, we have arrived at the end of our journey—to another stage thereof, at least. We have flown from Knightsbridge to Bermondsey, not exactly as the crow flies, nor yet as straight as an arrow from a Tartar’s bow; but still we have gyrated and skimmed and wheeled along somehow, even as a sparrow seeking knowledge on the housetops and corn in the street kennels. And now we will go out of town.

Whithersoever you choose; but by what means of conveyance? By water? The penny steamboats have not commenced their journeys yet. The _Pride of the Thames_ is snugly moored at Essex Pier, and _Waterman_, No. 2, still keeps her head under her wing—or under her funnel, if you will. The omnibuses have not yet begun to roll in any perceptible numbers, and the few stage coaches that are still left (how they linger, those cheerful institutions, bidding yet a blithe defiance to the monopolising and all-devouring rail!) have not put in an appearance at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, the Flower Pot in Bishopsgate Street, or the Catherine Wheel in the Borough. So we must needs quit Babylon by railway. Toss up for a terminus with me. Shall it be London Bridge, Briarean station with arms stretching to Brighton the well-beloved, Gravesend the chalky and periwinkley, Rochester the martial, Chatham the naval, Hastings the saline, Dover the castellated, Tunbridge Wells the genteel, Margate the shrimpy, Ramsgate the asinine, Canterbury the ecclesiastical, or Herne Bay the desolate? Shall it be the Great Northern, hard by Battle Bridge and Pentonville’s frowning bastille? No; the fens of Lincolnshire nor the moors of Yorkshire like me not. Shall it be the Great Western, with its vast, quiet station, its Palladio-Vitruvian hotel, and its promise of travel through the rich meadows of Berkshire and by the sparkling waters of Isis, into smiling Somerset and blooming Devon? No; cab fares to Paddington are ruinously expensive, and I have prejudices against the broad gauge. Shall it be the Eastern Counties? Avaunt! evil-smelling Shoreditch, bad neighbourhood of worse melodramas, and cheap grocers’ shops where there is sand in the sugar and birch-brooms in the tea. No Eastern Counties carriage shall bear me to the pestiferous marshes of Essex or the dismal flats of Norfolk. There is the South-Western. Hum! The Hampton Court line is pleasant; the Staines, Slough, and Windsor delicious; but I fancy not the Waterloo Road on a fine morning. I am undecided. Toss up again. Heads for the Great Western; tails for the London and North-Western. Tails it is; and abandoning our aërial flight, let us cast ourselves into yonder Hansom, and bid the driver drive like mad to Euston Square, else we shall miss the seven o’clock train.

This Hansom is a most dissipated vehicle, and has evidently been up all night. One of its little silk window-curtains has been torn from its fastenings and flutters in irregular festoons on the inward wall. The cushions are powdered with cigar ashes; there is a theatrical pass-check, and the thumb of a white kid glove, very dirty, lying at the back. The long-legged horse with his ill-groomed coat, all hairs on end like the fretful porcupine his quills, and his tail whisking with derisive defiance in the face of the fare, carries his head on one side, foams at the mouth, and is evidently a dissipated quadruped, guilty, I am afraid, of every vice except hypocrisy. Of the last, certainly, he cannot be accused, for he makes not the slightest secret of his propensity for kicking, biting, gibbing, rearing, and plunging, a succession of which gymnastic operations brings us, in an astonishingly brief space of time, to George Street, Euston Square; where the cabman, who looks like a livery-stable edition of Don Cæsar de Bazan, with a horse-cloth instead of a mantle, tosses the coin given him into the air, catches it again, informs me contemptuously that money will grow warm in my pocket if I keep it there so long, and suddenly espying the remote possibility of a fare in the extreme distance of the Hampstead Road, drives off—“tools” off, as he calls it—as though the Powers of Darkness, with Lucifer and Damagorgon at their head, were after him.

I think the Euston Square Terminus is, for its purpose, the handsomest building I have ever seen, and I have seen a few railway stations. There is nothing to compare to it in Paris, where the termini are garish, stuccoed, flimsy-looking structures, half booths and half barracks. Not Brussels, not Berlin, not Vienna, can show so stately a structure, for a railway station, _bien entendu_; and it is only, perhaps, in St. Petersburg, which seems to have been built with a direct reference to the assumption of the Imperial crown at some future period by the King of Brobdignag, that a building can be found—the Moscow Railway Terminus, in fact—to equal in grandeur of appearance our columniated palace of the iron road. But the Russian station, like all else in that “Empire of Façades,” is deceptive: a magnificent delusion, a vast and splendid sham. Of seeming marble without it is; within, but bad bricks and lath and plaster.

_Open sesame!_ Let us pass the crowds of railway porters, who have not much to do just now, and are inclined to lounge about with their hands in their pockets, and to lean—in attitudes reminding the spectator of the Grecian statues clad in green velveteen, and with white letters on their collars—on their luggage trucks, for the passengers by the seven o’clock train are not much addicted to arriving in cabs or carriages which require to be unloaded, and there are very few shilling or sixpenny gratuities to be earned by the porters, for the securing of a comfortable corner seat with your back to the engine, or that inestimable comfort, a place in a first-class carriage whose door the guard is good enough to keep locked, and in which you can make yourself quite at home with a bottle of sherry, some walnuts, and a quiet game at _écarté_ or _vingt un_. The seven o’clock trainbands are not exactly of the class who drink sherry and play cards; they are more given to selling walnuts than to eating them. They are, for the most part, hard-faced, hard-handed, poorly-clad creatures; men in patched, time-worn garments; women in pinched bonnets and coarse shawls, carrying a plenitude of baskets and bundles, but very slightly troubled with trunks or portmanteaus. You might count a hundred heads and not one hat-box; of two hundred crowding round the pay-place to purchase their third-class tickets for Manchester, or Liverpool, or even further north, you would have to look and look again, and perhaps vainly after all, for the possessor of a railway rug, or even an extra overcoat. Umbrellas, indeed, are somewhat plentiful; but they are not the slim, aristocratic trifles with ivory handles and varnished covers—enchanter’s wands to ward off the spells of St. Swithin, which moustached dandies daintily insert between the roof and the hat-straps of first-class carriages. Third-class umbrellas are dubious in colour, frequently patched, bulgy in the body, broken in the ribs, and much given to absence from the nozzle. Swarming about the pay-place, which their parents are anxiously investing, thirteen-and-fourpence or sixteen-and-ninepence in hand, are crowds of third-class children. I am constrained to acknowledge that the majority of these juvenile travellers cannot be called handsome children, well-dressed children, even tolerably good-looking children. Poor little wan faces you see here, overshadowed by mis-shapen caps, and bonnets nine bauble square; poor little thin hands, feebly clutching the scant gowns of their mothers; weazened little bodies, shrunken little limbs, distorted often by early hardship, by the penury which pounced on them—not in their cradles—they never had any—but in the baker’s jacket in which they were wrapped when they were born, and which will keep by them, their only faithful friend, until they die, and are buried by the parish—poor ailing little children are these, and among them who shall tell how many hungry little bellies! Ah! judges of Amontillado sherry; crushers of walnuts with silver nut-crackers; connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow seal; gay riders in padded chariots; proud cavaliers of blood-horses, you don’t know how painfully and slowly, almost agonisingly, the poor have to scrape, and save, and deny themselves the necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare. It is a long way to Liverpool, a long way to Manchester; the only passengers by the seven o’clock train who can afford to treat the distance jauntily, are the Irish paupers, who are in process of being passed to their parish, and who will travel free. O! marvels of eleemosynary locomotion from Euston Square to Ballyragget or Carrighmadhioul!

But hark! the train bell rings; there is a rush, and a trampling of feet, and in a few seconds the vast hall is almost deserted. This spectacle has made me somewhat melancholy, and I think, after all, that I will patronise the nine o’clock express instead of the PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN.

Let us follow the crowd of third-class passengers on to the vast platform. There the train awaits them, puffing, and snorting, and champing its adamantine bit, like some great iron horse of Troy suddenly gifted with life and power of locomotion. By the way, I wonder how that same wooden horse we are supposed to read about in Homer, but study far more frequently in the pages of Lemprière, or in the agreeable metrical romance of Mr. Alexander Pope, really effected its entrance into Ilium. Was it propelled on castors, on rollers, or on those humble wooden wheels that quickened the march of the toy horse of our nonage—the ligneous charger from Mr. Farley’s shop in Fleet Street, painted bright cream-colour, with spots resembling red wafers stuck all over him, a perpendicular mane, and a bushy tail? Very few first or even second-class carriages are attached to the great morning train. The rare exceptions seem to be placed there more as a graceful concession to the gentilities, or the respectabilities, or the “gigabilities,” as Mr. Carlyle would call them, than with any reference to their real utility in a journey to the north. Who, indeed, among the bustling Anglo-Saxons, almost breathless in their eagerness to travel the longest possible distance in the shortest possible time, would care to pay first-class fare for a trip to Manchester, which consumes ten mortal hours, when, by the space-scorning express, the distance may be accomplished, at a not unreasonable augmentation of fare, in something like five hours? So the roomy six-seated chariots, with their arm-rests and head-rests, are well nigh abandoned; and the wooden boxes, which appear to have been specially designed by railway directors to teach second-class travellers, who can afford to pay more than third-class fare, that they had much better pay first-class, and go the entire animal (which, indeed, seeing how abominable are our second-class carriages in England, is a far preferable proceeding), are not much better tenanted. Some misanthropic men, in Welsh wigs and fur caps with flaps turned down over the ears, peer at us as we pass, pull up the window-frames captiously, as though they suspected us of a design to intrude on their solitude, and, watch in hand, call out in hoarse voices to the guard to warn him it is time the train had started. What is the use of being in a hurry, gentlemen? you will have plenty of breathing-time at Tring, and Watford, and Weedon, and some five-and-twenty other stations, besides opportunities for observing the beauties of nature at remote localities, where you will be quietly shunted off on to a siding to allow the express to pass you by.

But what a contrast to the quietude of the scarcely-patronised first and second-class _wagons_ are the great hearse-like caravans in which travel the teeming hundreds who can afford to pay but a penny a mile! Enter one of these human menageries where the occupants are stowed away with little more courtesy or regard to their comfort than might be exemplified by the master of the ceremonies of one of Mr. Wombwell’s vans. What a hurly-burly; what a seething mass; what a scrambling for places; what a shrill turmoil of women’s voices and children’s wailings, relieved, as in the _Gospodin Pomilaïou_ (the Kyrie Eleison of the Russian churches), by the deep bass voices of gruff men! What a motley assemblage of men, women, and children, belonging to callings multifariously varied, yet all marked with the homogeneous penny-a-mile stamp of poverty! Sailors with bronzed faces and tarry hands, and those marvellous tarpaulin pancake hats, stuck, in defiance of all the laws of gravity, at the back of their heads; squat, squarely-built fellows, using strange and occasionally not very polite language, much given to “skylarking” with one another, but full of a simple, manly courtesy to all the females, and marvellously kind to the babies and little children; gaunt American sailors in red worsted shirts, with case-knives suspended to their belts, taciturn men expectorating freely, and when they do condescend to address themselves to speech, using the most astounding combination of adjective adjurations, relating chiefly to their limbs and their organs of vision; railway navvies going to work at some place down the line, and obligingly franked thither for that purpose by the company; pretty servant-maids going to see their relatives; Jew pedlars; Irish labourers in swarms; soldiers on furlough, with the breast of their scarlet coatees open, and disclosing beneath linen of an elaborate coarseness of texture—one might fancy so many military penitents wearing hair tunics; other soldiers in full uniform, with their knapsacks laid across their knees, and their muskets—prudently divested of the transfixing bayonets—which the old women in the carriage are marvellously afraid will “go off,” disposed beside them, proceeding to Weedon barracks under the command of a staid Scotch corporal, who reads a tract, “Grace for Grenadiers” or “Powder and Piety,” and takes snuff; journeymen mechanics with their tool-baskets; charwomen, servants out of place, stablemen, bricklayers’ labourers, and shopboys.

Ay, and there are, I am afraid, not a few bad characters among the crowd: certain dubiously-attired, flash-looking, ragged dandies, with cheap pins in their foul cravats, and long greasy hair floating over their coat-collars, impress me most unfavourably, and dispose me to augur ill for the benefit which Manchester or Liverpool may derive from their visit; and of the moral status of yonder low-browed, bull-necked, villanous-looking gentleman, who has taken a seat in a remote corner, between two stern guardians, and who, strive as he may to pull his coat-cuffs over his wrists, cannot conceal the presence of a pair of neat shining handcuffs, there cannot, I perpend, exist any reasonable doubt. But we must take the evil with the good: and we cannot expect perfection, not even in a Parliamentary Train.

EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.—ST. JAMES’S PARK—THE MALL.

Of the great army of sightseers, there are few but have paid a visit to Portsmouth, and, under the guidance of a mahogany-faced man in a pea-jacket, who has invariably served in his youth as coxswain to Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B., have perambulated from stem to stern, from quarterdeck to kelson, that famous ship from whose signal halyards flew out, fifty-three years since, the immortal watchword “England expects every man to do his duty,” in Trafalgar Bay. We are (or rather were, till the epoch of the late passport regulations and the war), an ambitious army of sightseers in this year of questionable grace, ’59; and nothing less would serve us then for an autumn trip than a picnic in the Street of Tombs at Pompeii, a moonlight polka among the rank docks and charlocks and slimy reptiles of the Roman Colosseum, a yacht voyage up the gulf of Bothnia, or a four days’ jolting in a _telega_ from Moscow to the fair of Nishni-Novgorod. But in the days of yore, when this old hat was new, and Manlius was consul, and the eleven hours’ route to the Continent existed not, we went a-gipsying in a less ostentatious manner. The Lions in the Tower, the Horns at Highgate, the Spaniards at Hampstead, the Wandering Minstrel at Beulah Spa; and on highdays and holidays a stage-coach and pleasure-boat journey to Portsmouth, Southampton, Netley Abbey, Carisbrook Castle, and the Undercliff; these filled up the simple measure of our pleasure-gadding. We are improved now-a-days, and go the grand tour like my lord; and are wiser, and better, and happier—of course.

When in the noble harbour of Portsmouth you have taken your wife, your sweetheart, or your friend the intelligent foreigner, to whom you wish to show the glories of England, and when the cicerone of the great war-ship has told his parrot-tale about admirals’ quarter-galleries and officers’ gun-rooms; when at last he has taken you into the cabin, and at the back shown you the sorrowful inscription painted on the stanchion, “HERE NELSON DIED!” did never a sudden desire come across you to be left alone—to have the army of sight-seers banished five hundred miles away—to be allowed to remain there in the silent cabin among the shadows, to muse on the memory of the great dead, to conjure up mind-pictures of that closing scene: the cannon booming overhead; the terrified surgeons with outspread bandages, and probes, and knives, knowing that their skill was of no avail; the burly shipmen crying like little children; and alone tranquil and serene among that sorrowful group, peaceful as an infant in its cradle, the Admiral, his stars and ribbons gleaming in the lantern’s fitful rays, but never with so strong a light as the gory ghastliness of his death wound; the brave yellow-haired Admiral, with the puny limbs and giant’s heart, waiting to die, ready to die, happy to die, thanking God that he had done his duty to his king, and meekly saying, “Kiss me, Hardy.”

That inscription in the _Victory’s_ cabin has been to me the source of meditation frequent and infinitely pleasant. I love to think, walking in historical streets and houses, that my feet are treading over spots where men for ever famous have left an imprint of glory. I peer into the soil, the stones, the planks, to descry the shadowy mark of Hercules’ foot, of the iron-plated sole of the warrior, the sandalled shoon of the saint, the dainty heel of the brocaded slipper of beauty. Every place that history or tradition has made her own is to me a field, not of forty, but of forty thousand footsteps; and I please myself sometimes with futile wishes that the boundaries of these footsteps might have been marked by plates of brass and adamant, as Nelson’s death-place is marked on board his flagship. It were better, perhaps, to leave the exact spot to imagination; for though I would give something to know the very window of the Banqueting House from whence Charles Stuart came out to his death, and the precise spot where he turned to Juxon and uttered his mysterious injunction “Remember!” I would not care to know the particular branch of the tree to which Judas affixed his thrice-earned halter when he hanged himself: I could spare Mr. Dix the trouble of telling me the identical spot on the tavern table on which the coroner laid his three-cornered hat when he held his inquest on the worthless impostor Chatterton—a “marvellous boy” if you will, but one who perished in his miserable folly and forgery—and I could well exempt the legitimacy-bemused courtiers of Louis XVIII. from perpetuating, as they did in brass, the few inches of soil at Calais first pressed on his return to France by the foot of that gross fat man.

There are two cities in the world, London and Paris, so full of these footstep memories, so haunted by impalpable ghosts of the traces of famous deeds, that locomotion, to one of my temperament, becomes a task very slow, if not painfully difficult, of accomplishment. ’Tis a long way from the Luxor Obelisk to the Carrousel; but it’s a week’s journey when you feel inclined to stop at every half-dozen yards’ distance, questioning yourself and the ministering spirits of your books, pointing your fingers to the paving-stones, and saying—Here the guillotine stood; here Louis died; here the daughter of Maria Theresa cast her last glance at the cupolas of the Tuileries; here Robespierre was hooted; here Théroigne de Méricourt was scourged; here Napoleon the Great showed the little king of Rome to the people; here, on the great Carrousel Place, he, arrayed in the undying gray coat and little hat, reviewed the veterans of his guard, many and many a time at EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.

There! I have brought you round to the subject-matter of this article, and to the complexion of “Twice Round the Clock” again; and the stroke is, I flatter myself, felicitous—rivalling Escobar or Dom Calmet in Jesuitry, Metternich and Menschikoff in diplomacy. You thought doubtless that I was about to launch into an interminable digression; you may perhaps have said, scoffingly, that Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B., Maximillien Robespierre, Charles the First’s head, and the Emperor Napoleon’s cocked hat, could have nothing whatsoever to do with the Mall of Saint James’s Park at eight o’clock in the morning. You are mistaken. The allusions to memorable footsteps were all cunningly devised with a reference to the great Field of Famous Footsteps—the Mall, which, were the imprint of those bygone pedal pressures marked out with landmarks, such as those in the _Victory’s_ cabin, would become a very Field of the Cloth of Brass. And what better time can there be to muse upon the traditional glories of the Mall and the fame of its frequenters, than eight a.m. in sweet summer time?

I grant the clown, the dunderheaded moneyspinner who votes that books are “rubbish,” the cobweb-brained fop who languidly declares reading to be a “bore,” will find in the broad smooth Mall, just a Mall, broad and smooth, and nought else—even as Peter Bell found in a primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose, and nothing more. At eight o’clock in the morning, to clown, dunderhead, and cobweb-brain, the Mall is a short cut from Marylebone to Westminster; the water-carts are laying the dust; mechanics are going to work; there are some government offices in the distance; two big guns on queer-looking carriages; some scattered children; a good many birds, making rather a disagreeable noise, in the green trees; and a few cows being milked in a corner. But come with me, dweller in the past, lover of ancient and pleasant memories, hand-and-glove friend of defunct worthies, shadowy acquaintances in ruffs and peaked beards and point lace. Let us deliver dunderhead and cobweb-brain to the tormentors, and, sitting on a rustic bench beneath a spreading tree, summon the Famous Footsteps; summon the dead-and-gone walkers to pace the Mall again. Here they come! a brave gathering, a courtly throng, a worshipful assemblage, but oft-times a motley horde and a fantastic crew. Here is Henry the Eighth’s Mall, a park where that disreputable monarch indulged in “the games of hare and pheasant, partridge and heron, for his disport and pastime,” and where he had a deer killed for the amusement of the “Embassador from Muscovie.” Here is Saint James’s Park in the reign of clever, shrewish, cruel Queen Bess—a park only used as an appendage to the tilt-yard and a nursery for deer: here is the “inward park” (now the inclosure and ornamental water), into which, so late as the commencement of Charles II.’s reign, access to the public was denied; and where, in 1660, Master Pepys saw a man “basted” by the keeper for carrying some people over on his back through the water. Here is Charles II.’s famous Mall, for the first time broad and smooth, the park planted and reformed by the celebrated French gardener, Le Nôtre, laid out with fish-ponds and a decoy for water-fowl; the Mall itself a vista of half a mile in length, on which the game of Pall Mall was played, and which, always according to curious Samuel Pepys, who “discoursed with the keeper of the Pall Mall as he was sweeping it,” was floored with mixed earth, and over all that cockle-shells, powdered and spread to keep it fast; which, however, in dry weather, turned to dust and deadened the ball. In this park of Charles II. was the fantastic little territory of Duck Island, the ground contained within the channels of the decoy, and which London Barataria had revenues and laws and governors appointed by the king. The Duke of Saint Simon’s friend, Saint Evremond, was one of these governors; Sir John Flock another. Close to Duck Island was Rosamond’s Pond, a piece of water whose name bore a dim analogy to the _soubriquet_ with which, in later years, Waterloo Bridge has been qualified; for it was in Rosamond’s Pond that forsaken women came in preference, at even-song, to drown themselves. There was the Birdcage Walk, where Mr. Edward Storey kept his Majesty’s aviary, and dwelt in the snug little hut recently demolished, known as Storey’s Gate. There was the Mulberry Garden, into which the river Tyburn flows, and so into Tothill Fields and the Thames; and there was Spring Gardens, where the beaux went to look at the citizens’ wives; and the citizens’ wives, I hope, to drink chocolate, but I fear to look at the beaux.