Chapter V: Part 5

Two hours afterwards, and the Chief will be on the other side of Westminster Hall, in the Commons’ House of Parliament, pounding away on the wrongs of a few people in Staffordshire who object to the odour of some neighbouring gas-works, and, to use an Americanism, “chawing up” the ministry at a tremendous rate. How is it that about the same time he manages to dine with the Merchant Cobblers at their grand old hall on St. Crispin’s Hill; to take the chair at the festival of the Association for improving the moral condition of Mudlarks; to make a two hours’ speech at the meeting for the suppression of street “catch-’em-alive-O’s;” to look in at half-a-dozen west-end clubs; to hear Bosio—ah! poor Bosio, ah, poor swan, miasma’d to death in the horrid marshes of Ingria and Carelia—in the last act of the “Traviata;” and to be seen flitting out of the bar-parlour of Joe Muttonfist’s hostelry in Mauley Court-yard, Whitechapel, where the whereabouts of the impending great fight between Dan Bludyer, surnamed the “Mugger,” and Tim Sloggan, better known as “Copperscull,” for two hundred pounds a-side, will be imparted to the patrons of the “fancy?” Tom Stoat, who knows everything and everybody, says he saw the Chief at the Crystal Palace Flower Show, and it is certain that he (the Chief) will be at the Queen’s Ball to-night (he has a dinner party this evening), and that after the opera he will take a chop and kidney at Evans’s. And after that? What a life! What frame can bear, what mind endure it! When does he study? when does he read those mammoth briefs? when does he note those cases, prepare those eloquent exordia and perorations? Whence comes the minute familiarity with every detail of the case before him which he seems to possess, the marvellous knowledge he displays of the birth, parentage, education, and antecedents of the trembling witnesses whom he cross-examines? What a career! and see, there is its Hero, shambling into Westminster Hall, a spare, shrunken, stooping, prematurely-aged man. He has not had a new wig these ten years, and his silk gown is shabby, almost to raggedness. He is no doubt arguing some abstruse point of law with that voluble gentleman, his companion, in the white waistcoat. Let us approach and listen, for I am Asmodeus and we are eaves-droppers. Point of law! Upon my word, he is talking about the Chester Cup.

In with ye, then, my merry men all, to the hall of Westminster, for the Court of Queen’s Bench is sitting. It is not a handsome court; it is not an imposing court. If I were to say that it was a very mean and ugly room, quite unworthy to figure as an audience-chamber for the judges of the land, I don’t think that I should be in error. Where are the lictors and the fasces? Where the throned daïs on which the wise men of the Archeopagus should properly sit? The bench looks but an uncomfortable settle! the floor of the court is a ridiculous little quadrangle of oak, like a pie-board; the witness-box is so small that it seems capable of holding nothing but the shooting “Jack” of our toyshop experience; and the jury-box has a strong family likeness to one of the defunct Smithfield sheep-pens, where sit the intelligent jury, who have an invincible propensity, be the weather hot or cold, for wiping their foreheads with blue cotton pocket handkerchiefs. A weary martyrdom some of those poor jurymen pass; understanding a great deal more about the case on which they have to deliver at its commencement than at its termination; bemused, bewildered, and dazzled by the rhetorical flourishes and ingenious sophistry of the counsel on both sides, and utterly nonplussed by the elaborately obscure pleas that are put in. But the usher has sworn them in that they “shall will and truly try” the matter before them; and try it they must. To a man who has, perhaps, a matter of sixty or seventy thousand pounds at stake on the issue of a trial, the proceedings of most tribunals seem characterised by strange indifference, and an engaging, though, to the plaintiff and defendant, a somewhat irritating _laisser aller_. The attorneys take snuff with one another, and whisper jokes. The counsel chat and poke each other in the ribs; the briefless ones, in the high back rows, scribble caricatures on their blotting-pads, or pretend to pore over “faggot” briefs, or lounge from the Queen’s Bench into the Exchequer, and from the Exchequer into the Bail Court, and so on and into the Common Pleas; the usher nods, and cries, “Silence,” sleepily; the clerk reads in a droning monotonous voice documents of the most vital importance, letters that destroy and blast a life-long reputation of virtue and honour: letters that bring shame on noble women, and ridicule on distinguished men; vows of affection, slanderous accusations, outbursts of passion, anonymous denunciations, ebullitions of love, hatred, revenge. Some one is here, doubtless, to report the case for to-morrow’s papers, but no active pens seem moving. The Chief has not assumed his legal harness yet; and the junior counsel employed in the case are bungling over their preliminaries. The faded moreen curtains; the shabby royal arms above the judge, with their tarnished gilding, subdued-looking lion, and cracked unicorn; the ink-stained, grease-worn desks and forms; the lack-lustre, threadbare auditory, with woe-be-gone garments and mien, who fill up the hinderpart of the auditory: though what they can want in the Court of Queen’s Bench Heaven only knows; the bombazine-clad barristers, in their ill-powdered wigs—quite fail in impressing you with a sense of anything like grandeur or dignity. Yet you are in _Banco Reginâ_. Here our sovereign lady the Queen is supposed to sit herself in judgment; and from this court emanates the Great Writ of Right—the Habeas Corpus. To tell the truth, neither counsel, jury, nor audience seem to know or to care much about what is going on; but there are three persons who sit up aloft—not exactly sweet little cherubs, for they are very old, wrinkled men—who know the case like a book, and considerably better than many books; who have weighed the _pros_ and _cons_ to the minutest hair’s breath, to a feather’s turn of the scale, who are awake and alive, alive O! to all the rhetorical flourishes and ingenious sophistry of the advocates, and who will tell the jury exactly what the case is made of in about a tithe of the time that the junior counsel would take in enumerating wrongs of which the plaintiff complains, or whose commission the defendant denies. It is an edifying sight to watch the presiding judge—that shrivelled man in petticoats—with his plain scratch wig all awry. Now he hugs his arms within his capacious sleeves; now he crosses his legs; now, yes, now he twiddles his judicial thumbs; now he nods his august head, allows it to recline over one shoulder, and seems on the point of falling off to sleep; now he leans wearily, his cheek in his hand, his elbow on the bench, first on one side, then on the other; then he rises, shakes his old head, yawns, and, with his hands in his pockets, surveys the outer bar through gold-rimmed spectacles. He seems the most bored, the most indifferent spectator there; but only wait till the chiefs on both sides have concluded their eloquent bamboozling of the jury; mark my Lord Owlett settle his wig and his petticoats then, sort and unfold the notes he has been lazily (so it seemed) scrawling from time to time, and in a piping, quavering voice, begin to read from them. You marvel at the force, the clarity, the perspicuity of the grand old man; you stand abashed before the intellect, clear as crystal, at an age when man’s mind as well as his body is oft-times but labour and sorrow; you are astonished that so much vigour, so much shrewdness, so much eloquence, should exist in that worn and tottering casket. Goodness knows, I am not an optimist, and give but too much reason to be accused of _nil admirari_ tendencies; yet I cannot help thinking that if on this earth there exists a body of men grandly wise, generously eloquent, nobly impartial, and sternly incorruptible, those men are the judges of England.

Come away though, now, Don Cleophas; we must go further afield. The case that is “on” just now is not of sufficient interest to detain us; though here is an episode sufficiently grotesque. An old lady is entitled to some damages, or to some verdict, or to some money or apology, or, at all events, something from somebody. My Lord Owlett suggests a compromise, and instructs counsel to ask her what she will take to settle matters.

“What will you take?” asks the gentleman in the bob-tailed wig of the old lady.

Now the old lady is very deaf, and merely shakes her head at the counsel, informing the jury, in confidence, that she is “very hard o’ hearin’.”

“His Lordship wants to know what you will take?” asks the counsel again; this time bawling as loud as ever he can in the old lady’s ear.

“I thank his lordship kindly,” the ancient dame answers stoutly, “and if it’s no illconwenience to him, _I’ll take a little warm ale_!”

And, amid a roar of laughter from the spectators, we quit the Court of Queen’s Bench.

Nor must we linger, either, beneath William Rufus’s carved roof-tree, so ingeniously heightened, and otherwise transmogrified, by Sir Charles Barry and his satellites. This is a different Westminster Hall to that which I knew in my childhood, just after the great fire of ’34. There was no great stained glass window at the end then, no brazen Gothic candelabra, no golden House of Lords in the corridor beyond, where the eye is dazzled with the gilding, the frescoes, the scarlet benches and rich carpets, and where the Lord High Chancellor sits on the woolsack, like an allegory of Themis in the midst of a blaze of fireworks. In my time, the keeper of her Majesty’s conscience and the Great Seal sat in a panelled room, like a dissenting chapel. Let us hasten forth from the Great Hall, for it is full of memories. I spoke of famous footsteps on the Mall, St. James’s; how many thousand footsteps—thousands?—millions rather, have been lost here in fruitless pacing up and down! Westminster Hall is always cool: well it may be so; the dust was laid and the air refrigerated centuries since by the tears and the sighs of ruined suitors. What a wondrous place the old hall is! what reminiscences it conjures up—they will _not_ be laid in the Red Sea—of the gorgeous banquets of the Plantagenets, of the trials of Laud and Strafford, and of Laud and Strafford’s master; of Mr. Jonathan Wild’s ancestor walking the hall with a straw in his shoe; of poor little Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley, her husband, standing their trial here on a velvet-covered platform in the midst of the hall, for treason to Bloody Mary. Did they ever cut a state prisoner’s head off in Westminster Hall, I wonder, as they did Mary Stuart’s in the hall at Fotheringay? The place is large enough.

* * * * *

Once again I stand within the precincts of the Queen’s Bench; but where is my Lord Owlett, where the bewigged barristers and the jury-box with the “twelve honest men” within wiping their semperperspiring foreheads? I am standing in the centre of a vast gravelled area, bounded on the south side by a brick wall of tremendous height, and crowned by those curious arrangements of geometrical spikes known as _chevaux de frise_. To the north there is a range of ordinary-looking houses, the numbers of which are painted very conspicuously in white characters on a black ellipse above the doors, about which, moreover, there is this peculiarity, that they are always open. If you peep through the yawning portals, you will see that the staircases are of stone, and that the roofs of the rooms on the ground-floor are vaulted. There are no barred windows, no bolts, bars, or grim chains apparent, though from the back windows of these houses there is a pleasant prospect of another high wall, equally surmounted with _chevaux de frise_. When the spider has got the fly comfortably into his web, and has satisfied himself that he can’t get out, I daresay that he does not take the trouble to handcuff him. In the midst of this gravelled area stands a pump, known as the “Dolphin;” to the right of this institution, and somewhat in the back-ground, is a great square building, called the “State House.” The rooms here are double the size to those in the houses I have alluded to, and are accorded by the governor of the place as a matter of favour to those inmates of the—well, the college—who can afford to fill them with a sufficient quantity of furniture. Close to the State House is a strong iron gateway, through which the guardians of the college have a strong disinclination to allow the under-graduates to pass, unless they be furnished with a certain mysterious document called “a discharge.” The guardians themselves are ruddy men with very big keys; but they seem on the very best terms with the gentlemen whose intended exercise outside the walls they feel compelled (doubtless through solicitude for their precious health) to debar, and are continually bidding them “good morning” in the most affable manner; it being also one of their idiosyncrasies to rub their noses with the handles of the big keys while going through the salutation. In days not very remote there were certain succursals, or chapels of ease, to the college, in the shape of dingy tenements in the borough of Southwark, extending as far as the Elephant and Castle; and in these tenements, which were called the “Rules,” such collegians as were in a position to offer a fantastic guarantee entitled a “Bail Bond,” were permitted to dwell, and thence they wrote letters to their friends and relations, stating that the iron was entering into their souls, and that they were languishing—well, never mind where—in college. These “rules” were abolished in the early years of her present Majesty’s reign; and at the same time a stern Secretary of State prohibited the renewal of a notable saturnalia called “a Mock Election,” of which no less celebrated an artist than Haydon painted a picture (he was himself a collegian at the time), which was bought, for considerably more than it was worth, by King George IV. The saturnalia was fast falling into desuetude by itself; but the Home Secretary also interfered to put a stop to the somewhat boisterous conviviality which had reigned among those collegians who had money, from time immemorial, and which had converted the Queen’s Bench into a den of the most outrageous and disgraceful dissipation and revelry. Under the present not very stringent regulations (considering what a _carcere duro_ is, the other _alma mater_ of Whitecross Street, to say nothing of the hideous place called Horsemonger Lane), the collegians are restricted to the consumption of one quart of beer—which they may have just as strong as ever they like—or one imperial pint of wine, per diem, at their option; yet it is a very curious fact, that no collegian who was flush of cash was ever found to labour under any difficulty in providing sufficient refreshment for his friends when he gave a wine party in his room. The payment of rent is unknown in the college; and it is but rarely that the time-honoured system of “chummage,” or quartering two or mere collegians in one room, and allowing the richest to pay his companions a stipulated sum to go out and find quarters elsewhere, is resorted to. As a rule, the collegian on his arrival, after spending one night in a vaulted apartment close to the entrance, and which bears a strong resemblance to the Gothic vault described in “Rookwood”—an apartment known as the “receiving ward”—has allotted to him, by solemnly-written ticket, a whitewashed chamber of tolerable size, moderately haunted by mice, and “passably” infested by fleas. Straightway there starts up, as it were from the bowels of the earth, a corpulent female rubicund in countenance, tumbled in garments, and profuse in compliments, assuring him that he is the very “Himage of the Markis of Scatterbrass, which his aunt let him out by composing with his creditors,” or “Capting Spurbox, of the Hoss Guards, as ’ad champagne hevery mornin’, and went through the court payin’ nothink.” She, for a small weekly stipend—say, five shillings—agrees to furnish your room; and in an astonishingly short space of time you find the bare cube transformed into a sufficiently comfortable bed-room and sitting-room. For eighteenpence a week extra you may have a double green baize door with brass nails, like a verdant coffin, and white dimity curtains to your windows, with real tassels. In the train of the stout tumbled female, there always follows a gaunt woman of no particular age, with ropy hair, a battered bonnet, and scanty garments apparently nailed to her angular form, who expresses, with many curtsies, her desire to “do for you.” Don’t be alarmed; she simply means that for three or four shillings a week she will clean your room, boil your kettle, and bring up the dinner, which has been cooked for you in the common kitchen of the college. She, too, has an acolyte, a weazened old man in a smock frock and knee shorts (though I think that he must be dead or have left college by this time[3]) who for a shilling a week will make your boots shine like mirrors; who resides here, and has resided here for many years, because he can’t or won’t pay thirty pounds, and who is reported to be worth a mint of money. So here the collegian lives, and makes as merry as he can under adverse circumstances. The same tender precautions adopted by the authorities of the college to prevent the unnecessary egress of those in _statu pupillari_, are enforced to preserve a due state of morality among them. There is a chapel, as there is an infirmary, within the walls; the lady collegians, of whom there is always a small number in hold, are kept in jealous seclusion. Dicing and card-playing are strictly prohibited, and contumacious contravention of the rules involves the probability of the recalcitrant student being immured in a _locus penitentiæ_ called the “Strong Room.” There he is kept for four and twenty hours, _without tobacco_. Horrible punishment! This is in the college attached to her Majesty’s Bench. Pshaw! Why should I beat about the Bench, or the bush, any longer, or even endorse the quibble adopted by those collegians who wish to have their letters addressed to them genteelly, of “No. 1, Belvidere Place?” That which I have been describing is a debtors’ jail—the Queen’s Prison, in fact.

And what of the collegians—the prisoners—themselves? It is ten o’clock in the morning, and they are sauntering about in every variety of shabby deshabille, smoking pipes after their meagre breakfasts, walking arm in arm with one another, or with friends who have come to see them, and whose ingress is permitted from nine a.m. until seven p.m. None are allowed to enter after that hour; but those visitors already in are allowed to stop till nine in the evening. Some of the collegian prisoners, poor fellows, have women and little children with them, who are very silly and sentimental, in their illogical way; but you may depend on it that, in nine out of ten of these groups, the staple theme of conversation is the probability of the captive being “out next week.” They are always going to be out next week, these caged birds; but they die sometimes in the Bench, for all that.

Don’t you think, too, that it would be as graceful as expedient to draw a veil over these broken-down men? Even the felons in Pentonville are allowed to wear masks in the exercise-yard. Why should I, whose sternest, strongest aim it is to draw from Life, and from the life only, but who wish to pluck the mote from no man’s eye, to cast a stone at no glass house built on the pattern of mine own, expatiate in word-pictures upon the dilapidated dandies, the whilom dashing bucks in dressing-gowns out at elbows, and Turkish caps with tassels, set, with a woe-begone attempt at jaunty bearing, on one side, the decayed tradesmen, the uncertificated bankrupts, the cankers of a calm world and a long peace, that prowl and shuffle through the yards of a debtors’ prison? Why, every man of the world has acquaintances, if not friends, there. Why, poor old Jack, who gave the champagne dinners we were so glad to be invited to, has been in the Bench for months. Yonder broken-winged butterfly, relapsing, quite against the order of nature, into a state of grubhood again, may have gone through his Humanities with the best of us, and may say _Hodie mihi, cras tibi_. To-day he is in jail; but to-morrow I, you, my brother the millionaire, may be taken in execution; and who shall say that we shall have the two pounds twelve wherewith to purchase the _habeas corpus_?

ELEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.—TROOPING THE GUARD, AND A MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE.

I have the fortune, or misfortune, to live in a “quiet street,” and am myself an essentially quiet man, loving to keep myself in the Queen’s peace, and minding my own business, though devoutly wishing that people would not mind it for me in quite so irritating a degree. I sleep soundly when in health, and never question Mrs. Lillicrap’s mystifying items in her weekly bill, of “mustard, vinegar, and mending,” or “pepper, postage stamps, and mother-o’-pearl buttons.” I never grumble at the crying of babies, remembering that a wise and good doctor once told me that those dear innocents pass the days of their nonage in a chronic state of stomach-ache and congestion of the brain, and console myself with that thought. I can even support, without much murmuring, the jangling of the pupils’ piano at Miss Besom’s establishment for young ladies, next door. Distance, and a party-wall, lend enchantment to the sound, and I set no more store by it than I do by the chirruping of the birds in the town-bred foliage at the extremity of Buckingham Street, or the puffing and snorting of the halfpenny steamboats at the “Fox-under-the-Hill.” I am so quiet, that I can allow the family of a distant blood-relation to reside in the parlours for twelve months, without troubling myself about their health; and I never yet rebelled at the perverse orthography of the washerwoman, who persists in spelling my half-hose thus: “Won pare sox.” When I die, I hope that they will lay me in a very quiet church-yard in Kent, that I know, where some one who cared for me has been mouldering away peacefully these four years, where the clergyman’s blind white pony will browse upon the salad that I am eating by the roots; where the children will come and have famous games—their silver voices and pattering feet upon the velvet turf make out a pleasant noise, I wot; and where they will write “_Requiescat in pace_” upon my gravestone; if, indeed, I leave maravedis enough behind me for Mr. Farley to cut me an inscription withal.

Yet, quiet as I am, I become at Eleven o’Clock in the Morning on every day of the week save Sunday a raving, ranting maniac—a dangerous lunatic, panting with insane desires to do, not only myself but other people, a mischief, and possessed, less by hallucination than by rabies. For so sure as the clock of St. Martin’s strikes eleven, so sure does my quiet street become a pandemonium of discordant sounds. My teeth are on edge to think of them. The “musicianers,” whose advent from Clerkenwell and the East-end of London I darkly hinted in a preceding chapter, begin to penetrate through the vaster thoroughfares, and make their hated appearance at the head of my street. First Italian organ-grinder, hirsute, sunburnt, and saucy, who grinds airs from the “Trovatore” six times over, follows with a selection from the “Traviata,” repeated half a dozen times, finishes up with the “Old Hundredth” and the “Postman’s Knock,” and then begins again. Next, shivering Hindoo, his skin apparently just washed in walnut juice, with a voluminous turban, dirty white muslin caftan, worsted stockings and hob-nailed shoes, who, followed by two diminutive brown imps in similar costume, sings a dismal ditty in the Hindostanee language, and beats the tom-tom with fiendish monotony. Next comes a brazen woman in a Scotch cap, to which is fastened a bunch of rusty black feathers, apparently culled from a mourning coach past service. She wears a faded tartan kilt, fleshings, short calico trews, a velveteen jacket, tin buckles in her shoes, and two patches of red brick-dust on her haggard cheeks, and is supposed to represent a Scottish highlander. She dances an absurd fling, interpolated occasionally with a shrill howl to the music of some etiolated bagpipes screeded by a shabby rogue of the male sex, her companion, arrayed in similar habiliments. Next come the acrobats—drum, clarionet, and all. You know what those nuisances are like, without any extended description on my part. Close on their heels follows the eloquent beggar, with his numerous destitute but scrupulously clean family, who has, of course, that morning parted with his last shirt. Then a lamentable woman with a baby begins to whimper “Old Dog Tray.” Then swoop into the street an abominable band of ruffians, six in number. They are swarthy villains, dressed in the semblance of Italian goatherds, and are called, I believe, _pifferari_. They play upon a kind of bagpipes—a hideous pig-skin-and-walking-stick-looking affair, and accompany their droning by a succession of short yelps and a spasmodic pedal movement that would be a near approach to a sailor’s hornpipe, if it did bear a much closer resemblance to the war-dance of a wild Indian. Add to these the Jews crying “Clo’!” the man who sells hearthstones, and the woman who buys rabbit-skins, the butcher, the baker, and the boys screaming shrill Nigger melodies, and rattling pieces of slate between their fingers in imitation of the “bones,” and you will be able to form an idea of the quietude of our street. From the infliction of the soot-and-grease-bedaubed and tambourine-and-banjo-equipped Ethiopian serenaders, we are indeed mercifully spared; but enough remains to turn a respectable thoroughfare into a saturnalia.

I can do nothing with these people. I shout, I threaten, I shake my fist, I objurgate them from my window in indifferent Italian, but to no avail. They defy, scorn, disregard, make light of me. They are encouraged in their abominable devices, not merely by the idlers in the street, the servant-maids gossiping at the doors, the boys with the baskets, and the nurse children, but by the people at the windows, who seem to have nothing to do but to look from their casements all day long. There is an ancient party of the female persuasion opposite my humble dwelling, who was wont to take intense interest in the composition of my literary essays. She used to bring her work to the window at first; but she never did a stitch, and soon allowed that flimsy pretext to fall through, and devoted herself with unaffected enjoyment to staring at me. As I am modest and nervous, I felt compelled to put a stop to this somewhat too persevering scrutiny; but I disdained to adopt the pusillanimous and self-nose-amputating plan of pulling down the window blinds. I tried taking her portrait as she sat, like an elderly Jessica, at the casement, and drew horrifying caricatures of her in red chalk, holding them up, from time to time, for her inspection; but she rather seemed to like this last process than otherwise; and I was obliged to change my tactics. The constant use of a powerful double-barrelled Solomon’s race-glass of gigantic dimensions was first successful in discomposing her, and ultimately routed her with great moral slaughter; and she now only approaches the window in a hurried and furtive manner. I daresay she thinks my conduct most unhandsome. She and the tall man in the long moustaches at number thirteen, all the pupils at the ladies’ school next door, the two saucy little minxes in black merino and worked collars at number nine, and that man with the bald head shaped like a Dutch cheese, in the parlour at number nine, who is always in his shirt sleeves, drums with his fingers on the window panes, and grins and makes faces at the passers-by, and whom I conscientiously believe to be a confirmed idiot, are all in a league against me, and have an alliance, offensive and defensive, with the musical _canaille_ below. They cry out “Shame” when I remonstrate with those nuisances: they shout and jeer at me when I sally forth from the door, and make rabid rushes at the man with the bagpipes: they inquire derisively whether I consider myself lord of the creation? I am tempted—desperately tempted—to avail myself of my rights as a Civis Romanus, to summon the aid of the police, and to give one of the grinders, howlers, or droners in charge. Mr. Babbage, the arithmetician, does it; why should not I? What progress can I make in “Twice Round the Clock” in the midst of this hideous din? But then I remember, with much inward trouble, that I have in public committed myself more than once in favour of street music—that I have laughed at the folly of putting down bagpipes and barrel-organs by act of Parliament. I remember, too—I hope in all its force and Truth—a certain axiom, that the few must always suffer for the enjoyment of the many—that we are not all sages in decimals and logarithms—or people writing in books and newspapers—that the sick, the nervous, the fastidious, and the hypochondriacal, are but drops of water in a huge ocean of hale, hearty, somewhat thick-skinned and thick-eared humanity, who like the noisy vagabonds who are my bane and terror in the quiet street, and admire their distressing performances. Some men cannot endure a gaping pig; to many persons the odour of all roots of the garlic family is intolerable. I hate cats. I had an aunt who said that she could not “abide” green as a colour. Yet we should not be justified, I think, in invoking the terrors of the legislature against roast pork, onions, cats, and green peas. Mr. Babbage must pursue his mathematical calculations in a study at the back of his house, and I must hie me to the Reading-room of the British Museum, or turn out for a stroll.

And in this stroll, which, if the weather be fine, almost invariably leads towards one or other of the parks, I am frequently permitted to witness the imposing ceremony of “trooping the guard” in the Palace-yard, St. James’s. Why her Majesty’s Foot Guards should be “trooped” at eleven o’clock in the morning, and in what precise evolutions the operation of “trooping” consists, I am unable to state. Eleven o’clock, too, does not seem always a rigidly adhered-to hour; for, on the mornings of the days consecrated to our “Isthmian games,” to the cosmopolitan Derby, and the more aristocratic, but equally attractive Ascot Cup, the time taken is nine instead of eleven, doubtless for the convenience of the heavy guardsmen, who, with heavy cigars protruding from their heavy moustaches, and heavy opera-glasses slung by their sides, go solemnly down to the races in heavy drags.

To the uninitiated, “trooping the guard” appears to consist in some hundred and fifty grenadiers in full uniform, their drums and fifes and their brass band at their head, marching from the Horse Guards, across the parade ground, and along the Mall to the Palace-yard, where the Queen’s colours are stuck into a hole in the centre, where the officer on guard salutes them, where the other officers chat in the middle of the quadrangle, and where officers and men, and a motley crowd of spectators, listen to the enlivening strains of the brass band playing selections from the popular operas of the day. No complicated manœuvres seem to be performed; the automaton-like inspection of the “troops” takes place on the other side of the park; and when the colours are firmly fixed, and left in charge of a sentry, the “troops” file off again, the officers repairing to their clubs, and the soldiers to their barracks, while the brass bandsmen at once subside into private life, and become civilians of decidedly Cockney tendencies.

Hungry men are said, sometimes, to lull the raging of their appetites by sniffing the hot, and, to some noses, fragrant breeze which is emitted from between the gratings of an eating-house. To some the contemplation of eel pies, smoking rounds of beef, rumpsteak pies, and pen’orths of pudding, shining in the glory of dripping, and radiant with raisins, is almost as satisfying as the absolute possession of those dainties. It is certain that contented spirits do yet exist, by whom the sight of the riches and the happiness of others is accepted as a compensation for the wealth and the felicity which they do not themselves enjoy. It is a very pleasant mental condition, this—to be able to stare a pastrycook’s window out of countenance, and partake of, in imagination, the rich plum-cakes, the raspberry-tarts, and the lobster-patties, without coveting those dainties; to walk up Regent Street, and wear, mentally, the “ducks of bonnets,” the Burnouse cloaks and the Llama shawls, which poverty forbids us to purchase; to walk through the Vernon or Sheepshanks collections, and hang up the delightful Landseers, Websters, and Mulreadys in fantastic mind-chambers of our own; to call Hampton Court and Windsor our palaces, and St. James’s and the Green our parks; to fancy that the good people who have horses and carriages, and jewels, and silks, and satins, have but a copyhold interest in them, and that the fee-simple of all these fine things is in us. Such imaginative optimists can sit down unmurmuringly to a Barmecide feast; the “Court Circular” pleases them as much as an invitation to the Queen’s ball; a criticism on “Lucrezia Borgia” at the opera delights them as much as an actual stall at Covent Garden; and Mr. Albert Smith’s Egyptian Hall ascent of Mont Blanc, and his more recent Chinese entertainment, are to them quite as full of interest and adventure as a real pilgrimage to Chamouni, a toilsome scramble up the “Grands Mulets,” a sail in a sampan on the Canton river, or a “fightee pigeon” with the “Braves” in Hog Lane.

The immortal young ladies who have been occupied in their eternal crochet-work any time since the siege of Troy, and who are called the Fates, have decided that it is better for me to be Alone. I am condemned for life to soliloquise. None of the young women with whom I have (to adopt the term current in domestic service) “kept company,” would, in the end, have anything to do with me. They were very punctual in sending me cards—one sent me cake, but that was long ago—when they were married. One said I squinted, another that I was ill-tempered, and a third wondered at my impudence. Joan went off to Australia to join her cousin the digger, who, having done well at Bendigo, had written home for a wife, as he would for a Deans’ revolver. Sarah married the linendraper (I am happy to state that he manifested himself stupid and ferocious, and went, commercially, to the dogs within six months after marriage); as for Rachel, she positively fell in love with the tailor who came to measure me for my wedding suit, and married _him_. A nursemaid with a perambulator nearly tripped me up the other day, and sitting in that infantile chariot was Rachel’s eldest. Even the young lady who sold sardines at Stettin, and who, while I was waiting three years since for the ice to break up in the Baltic, undertook to teach me the prettiest German I ever heard in Deutschland, evinced a decided partiality for a certain baker with a Vandyke beard, who was a member of the Philharmonic Society of that town on the Oder, and at length jilted me for a trumpeter in a dragoon regiment, a burly knave in a striped and fringed uniform, all red and yellow, like a flamingo. The heartless conduct of the grocer’s daughter towards me has already been recorded in print. So I am alone. Not repining, however, but taking pleasure in other people’s children, with the additional consolation of not having their little frocks and perambulators to pay for, and passably content to sit on a mile-stone by the great roadside, and smoke the calumet of peace, watching the wain of life, with youth on the box and pleasure in the dickey, tear by, till the dust thrown up by the wheels has whitened my hair, and it shall be time enough to think of a neat walking funeral for One.

Now, do you understand why I alluded to the pleasures of imagination in connection with the contemplation of cook-shops, pictures, and palaces? Now, do you comprehend how a hopelessly solitary man—if you put a single grain of philosophic _hachisch_ into that pacific calumet of his—can derive so much pleasure and contentment from the sight of other folk’s weddings? I say nothing of courtship, which, on the part of a third party, argues a certain amount of, perhaps, involuntary eavesdropping and espionage, but which, when the boys and girls love each other sincerely, is as delightful a sight as the sorest of eyes, the sorest of hearts, could desire to witness. What pretty ways they have, those simple young “lovyers!” what innocent prattlings and rompings, what charming quarrels and reconciliations! Edward would dance with Miss Totterdown last night; Clara flirted most shamefully with Wertha Bjornsjertnjöe, the Scandinavian poet, and Lady Walrus’s last lion. What confiding billings and cooings! how supremely foolish they are! and what an abhorrent thing is common-sense in love at all! Wondrously like ostriches, too, are Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy. They hide their pretty heads in each other’s bosoms, and fancy they are totally invisible. They have codes of masonic telegraphy, as legible as Long Primer to the meanest understanding. I reckon among my friends a professor of photography in fashionable practice, and marvellous are the stories he has to tell of the by-play of love that takes place sometimes in his glass studio. For you see, when, in order to “focus” a young couple before him, he throws the curtain of the camera over his head, Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy are apt, in the sweet ignorance of love, to fancy that the operator can’t see a bit what is going on; so Jenny arranges Jemmy’s hair, and gives the moustache a twist, and there is a sly kiss, and a squeeze, and a pressure of the foot or so, and a variety of harmless endearing blandishments, known to our American cousins (who are great adepts at sweet-hearting) under the generic name of “conoodling,” and all of which are faithfully transmitted through the lens, and neatly displayed in an inverted position on the field of the camera, to the edification of the discreet operator. Oh, you enamoured young men and women, you don’t know that the eyes of domestic Europe are always fixed on you, and that your pretty simperings and whimperings form a drama which becomes the source of infinite amusement and delight to the philosophic bystanders. And is it not much better so, and that our lads and lasses should court in the simple, kindly Anglo-Saxon way, than that we should adopt foreign manners, and marry our wives, as in France, starched and prim from the convent or the boarding-school? Away with your morose, sulky, icy, ceremonious courtships. The Shepherd in Virgil, the moralist said, grew acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. But he did not dwell there in sulky solitude, I will be bound. The rock was most probably the Rocher de Cancale, where he sat and ate _dinde truffée_, and quaffed Chambertin, with his Psyche, in a new bonnet and cream-coloured gloves, by his side. And they went to the play afterwards, and had merry times of it, you may be sure.

I am very fond of weddings, and, to abandon for a moment the egotism and engrossing self-sufficiency which so delightfully characterise my sex, I fancy that the sight of the solemnisation of matrimony has equal charms for that better part of creation, whose special vocation it is, under all circumstances, to be married and happy, but who are oft-times, alas! as hopelessly celibate as the Trappist. One can scarcely go to a wedding without seeing some of these brave knights-errant, these _preux chevalières_ of womanhood, these uncloistered nuns, these hermits in a vale of wax lights and artificial flowers, clustering in the galleries, or furtively ensconced in pews near the altar. They are very liberal to the pew-openers, these kind old maids, and are always ready with smelling-bottles if there be any fainting going on. They take their part in the crying with praiseworthy perseverance, and echo the responses in heartrending sobs; they press close to the bride as she comes down the aisle on the arm of her spouse, and eye her approvingly and the bridesmaids criticisingly; then go home, the big Church Service tucked beneath their mantles—go home to the solitary mutton chop and bleak shining hearth, with the cut paper pattern grinning through the bars like a skeleton. There are some cynics who irreverently call old maids “prancers,” and others who, with positive brutality, accuse them of leading monkeys in a place which I would much rather not hear of, far less mention. They are, to be sure, somewhat stiff and starched, have uncomfortable prejudices against even the moderate use of mild cigars, and persist in keeping hideous little dogs to snap at your ankles; but how often would the contemptuous term “old maid,” were its reality known, mean heroic self-sacrifice and self-denial—patience, fortitude, unrepining resignation? No man, who is not a Caliban or Miserrimus, need remain, his life long, a bachelor. The Siamese twins married; the living skeleton was crossed in love, but afterwards consoled himself with a corpulent widow; the hunch-backed Scarron found a beautiful woman to love and nurse him; and General Tom Thumb turned benedict the other day. But how many women—young, fair, and accomplished, pure and good and wise—are doomed irrevocably to solitude and celibacy! Every man knows such premature old maids; sees among a family of blooming girls one who already wears the stigmata of old maidenhood. It chills the blood to see these hopeless cases, to see the women resign themselves to their fate with a sad meek smile—to come back, year after year, and find them still meek, smiling, but sad, confirmed old maids. It is ill for me, who dwell in quite a Crystal Palace of a glass house, to throw so much as a grain of sand at the windows opposite, but I cannot refrain from sermonising my fellows on their self-conceited bachelorhood. What dullards were those writers in the “Times” newspaper about marriage and three hundred a year! Did Adam and Eve have three halfpence a year when they married? Has the world grown smaller? Are there no Australias, Americas, Indies? Are there no such things as marrying on a pound a week in a top garret, and ending in a mansion in Belgrave Square? no such things as toil, energy, perseverance? husband and wife cheering one another on, and in wealth at last pleasantly talking of the old times, the struggles and difficulties? We hear a great deal now-a-days about people’s “missions.” The proper mission of men is to marry, and of women to bear children; and those who are deterred from marriage in their degree (for we ought neither to expect nor to desire Squire B. to wed Pamela every day) by the hypocritical cant about “society” and “keeping up appearances,” had much better send society to the dogs and appearances to the devil, and have nothing more to do with such miserable sophistries.

This diatribe, which I sincerely hope will increase the sale of wedding-rings in the goldsmiths’ shops forty-fold, brings me naturally to the subject of the second cartoon, by which the ingenious artist who transcribes my inky men and women into flesh and blood, has chosen to illustrate the hour of eleven o’clock in the morning. Here we are at a fashionable wedding at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.

If I had the tongue or pen of Mr. Penguin, the urbane and aristocratic correspondent of the “Morning Post,” I should give you quite a vivid, and at the same time a refined, description of that edifying spectacle—a marriage in high life. How eloquent, and, by turn, pathetic and humorous, I could be on the bevy of youthful bridesmaids—all in white tulle over pink glacé silk, all in bonnets trimmed with white roses, and with bouquets of camelias and lilies of the valley! How I could expatiate, likewise, on the appearance of the beauteous and high-born bride, her Honiton lace veil, her innumerable flounces; and her noble parents, and the gallant and distinguished bridegroom, in fawn-coloured inexpressibles and a cream-coloured face; and his “best man,” the burly colonel of the Fazimanagghur Irregulars; and the crowd of distinguished personages who alight from their carriages at the little wicket in Piccadilly, and pass along the great area amid the cheers of the little boys! They are all so noble and distinguished, that one clergyman can’t perform the ceremony, and extra parsons are provided like extra oil-lamps on a gala night at Cremorne. The register becomes an autograph-book of noble and illustrious signatures; the vestry-room has sweet odours of Jocky Club and Frangipani lingering about it for hours afterwards; the pew-opener picks up white satin favours tied with silver twist. A white rose, broken short off at the stem, lies unregarded on the altar-steps; and just within the rails are some orange-blossoms from the bride’s coronal. For they fall and die, the blossoms, as well as the brown October leaves. Spring has its death as well as autumn: a death followed often by no summer, but by cold and cruel winter. The blossoms fall and die, and the paths by the hawthorn hedges are strewn with their bright corses. The blossoms droop and die: the little children die, and the green velvet of the cemetery is dotted with tiny grave-stones.

See, the bridal procession comes into garish Piccadilly, and, amid fresh cheers and the pealing of the joy-bells, steps into its carriages.

“Happy, happy, happy pair!
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave, deserve the fair.”

So sings Mr. John Dryden, whilom poet laureate. Let us hope that the brides of St. James’s are all as fair as the bridegrooms are brave, and that they all commence a career of happiness by that momentous plunge into the waters of matrimony at eleven o’clock in the morning. With which sincere aspiration, I will clap an extinguisher on the Hymeneal torch, which I have temporarily lighted, and so to read the births, marriages, and deaths in the “Times.”

NOON.—THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION-HOUSE, AND THE “BAY TREE.”

The red-whiskered, quick-tempered gentleman, who carried the shiny leather bag and the bundle of sticks—umbrella and fishing-rods tied together like the fasces of a Roman lictor—and who wore a cloak gracefully over his forty-shilling suit of heather tweed, “thoroughly well shrunk,” the gentleman who, at Morley’s Hotel, Trafalgar Square, and at twenty minutes before twelve, engaged a Hansom cabman, No. 9,009, and bade him drive “like anything” (but he said like something which I decline to mention) to the London Bridge Terminus of the South-Eastern Railway, has thrust his bundle of sticks, &c., through the little trap-door in the cabriolet’s roof, and has savagely ordered the driver to stop, or to drive him to Jericho, or to the deuce. But the high-towering Jehu of 9,009 cannot drive to the dominions of the deuce, even as did “Ben,” that famous Jarvey of the olden time, immortalised in the ballad of “Tamaroo.” He can drive neither to the right nor to the left, nor backwards nor forwards; for he is hemmed in, and blocked up, and jammed together in the middle of the Poultry; and just as a sarcastic saloon omnibus driver behind jeeringly bids him “keep moving,” accompanying the behest by the aggressive taunt of “gardner;” and just as the charioteer of the mail-cart in front affectionately recommends him not to be in a hurry, lest he should injure his precious health, Twelve o’Clock is proclaimed by the clock of St. Mildred’s, Poultry; and cabman 9,009 has lost his promised extra shilling for extra speed, and the red-whiskered gentleman has lost his temper, and the train into the bargain, and there will be weeping at Tunbridge Wells this afternoon, where a young lady, with long ringlets and a white muslin jacket, will mourn for her Theodore, and will not be comforted—till the next train arrives.