Chapter VI: Part 6

It is noon, high noon, in the City of London. Why did not the incautious cabman drive down Cannon Street, the broad and unimpeded? or why did he not seek his destination by crossing Waterloo Bridge—he of the red whiskers would have paid the toll cheerfully—and tread the mazes of Union Street, Borough? Perhaps he was an inexperienced cabman, new to its dædalian ways. Perhaps he was a prejudiced and conservative cabman, adhering to the old Poultry as the corporation adhered to the old Smithfield, and detesting newfangled thoroughfares. Perhaps he was a misanthropic cabman, whose chief delight was to make travellers lose trains. If such be the case, he has his wicked will now; and the red-whiskered gentleman, sulkily alighting, scowlingly pays him his legal fare, leaves him grumbling, and retires himself moodily muttering, conscious that he has nearly two hours before him through which to kick his heels, and not knowing what on earth to do with himself. Be of good cheer, red-whiskered, shipwrecked one. Comfort ye, for I am here, the wanderer of the clock-face, and the dweller on the threshold of time. I will show you brave sights, and make your heart dance with mulligatawny soup and Amontillado sherry at the “Cock,” in Threadneedle Street. You are not hungry yet? Well, we will stroll into the Stereoscopic Company’s magnificent emporium in Cheapside, and mock our seven senses with the delusions of that delightful toy, which, if Sir David Brewster didn’t invent, he should properly have invented. You care not for the arts? Shall we cross by King Street, and have a stare at Guildhall, with Gog and Magog, and the monument that commemorates Beckford’s stern resolve to “stand no nonsense” from George III.? Or we may stroll into Garraway’s, and mark how the sale of sandwiches and sherry-cobblers may be combined with the transfer of land and the vending of freehold houses. There is the auction-mart, too, if you have a fancy to see Simony sales by auction, and advowsons of the cures of immortal souls knocked down for so many pounds sterling. There is the rotunda of the Bank of England, with its many-slamming, zinc-plated doors, and its steps and flags worn away by the boots of the ever-busy stockbrokers. We will not go into the Dividend Office, for I have no dividends to draw now, and the sight makes me sad; neither will we enter the Great Hall where William the Third’s statue is (prettily noticed by Mr. Addison in a full-bottom-wigged allegory in the “Spectator”), and where the urbane clerks are for ever honouring the claims upon the old lady in Threadneedle Street; giving “notes for gold” and “gold for notes.” We will not enter, because we don’t want any change just now; and one of the Brothers Forrester, who is sure to be hovering about the court-yard, in conversation with yonder cock-hatted beadle in blazing scarlet, might think we came for gold or notes that didn’t belong to us. The Bullion Office we cannot visit, for we haven’t an order of admission; and there is one place especially, O rubicund-headed traveller, where we will be exceedingly cautious not to show our faces. That place is the interior of the Stock Exchange. I am not a “lame duck;” I never, to my knowledge, “waddled;” I never attempted to pry into the secrets of the “bulls” and the “bears;” my knowledge of stockjobbing is confined to the fact that I once became possessed, I scarcely know how, only that I paid for them, of fifty shares in a phantom gold-mining company; that I sold them, half an hour afterwards, at half-a-crown premium to a mysterious man in a dark room, up a court off Cornhill, who to every human being who entered his lair handed a long list covered with cabalistic figures, with the remark that it was “very warm,” and which—the list, not the weather—I believe contained the current prices of stocks, though it might have related to the market value of elephants, for aught I knew; that I pocketed the fifty half-crowns, and that I have never heard anything of the phantom company from that day to this. Vice-Chancellor somebody will be down upon me some day as a “contributory,” I suppose, and I shall be delivered over to the tormentors; but, meanwhile, I will tell you why I won’t take my red-whiskered friend into the Stock Exchange—why I should like mine enemy to go there as soon as convenient. I have heard such horrible stories of the tortures inflicted by the members of the “House,” upon unwary strangers who have strayed within its precincts; of the savage cries of “two hundred and one,” the shrieks, the yells, the whistles, and the groans; the dancing round the captive, the covering him with flour, the treading on his miserable toes, the buffeting of his wretched ears, the upripping of his unhappy coat-collar, and chalking of his luckless back; the “bonneting,” the “ballooning,” and the generally fiendish cruelties which intruders upon the speculators for the “account” have to suffer, that I would sooner venture without permission behind the scenes of a well-regulated theatre, or attempt to beard the lion in his den, or walk up, unannounced, into the sanctum of the editor of the “Times” newspaper, or pay a morning call in a Choctaw wigwam, myself being a Pawnee or a Sioux, at war with my friends the C.’s, or pass through Portugal Street, Cursitor Street, or Chancery Lane, at any hour of the day or night, if my affairs should happen to embarrassed, than trust myself to the tender mercies of the members of the Stock Exchange. They are the staunchest and most consistent of Conservatives.

Whither, then, away! Why, bless me, how stupid I have been! The Mansion House police-court opens at noon precisely, and we may enjoy, gratuitously, the sight of the Corporation Cadi, the Cæsar of Charlotte Row, the great Lord Mayor of London himself, dispensing justice to all comers. By the way, I wish his Lordship would render unto us one little modicum of justice, combined with equity, by ridding us of the intolerable swarm of ragged, disgusting-looking juvenile beggars, who beset pedestrians at the doors of Messrs. Smith, Payne, and Smith’s banking-house, and of the scarcely less intolerable importunities of the omnibus cads who are wrestling for old ladies and young children on the very threshold of the Mansion House. Here we are at the Municipal Hall of London’s Ædiles; architecture grand but somewhat gloomily florid, like George the First, say, in a passion, his bulbous Hanoverian jaw flaming from his perturbed perriwig—glowering, half-angry, half-frightened, as he tears his embroidered coat-tail from the grasp of Lady Nithsdale, and obstinately refuses pardon for that poor Jacobite lord yonder cooped up in the gloomy Tower under sentence of death, but who, thanks to his wife’s all-womanly devotion (well did Madame de Lavallete imitate her bright example to save _her_ chivalrous husband just one hundred years afterwards), will cheat the headsman’s axe and George’s Hanoverian malice yet. The attic storey was evidently clapped on as an afterthought, and threatens to tumble over on to the portico; the whole is profusely ornamented, like everything civic, and reminds me generally of a freestone model of the Lord Mayor’s state carriage, squared in the Corinthian manner, and the gilt gingerbread well covered with smoke and soot.

Not by that door in the basement will we enter, which is flanked by announcements relative to charity dinners, and youths who have absconded from their friends. Within that eternally-gaslit office is the place of business of the Eumenides of finance, whose grim duty it is to pursue forgers and bank-robbers through the world. There dwell, for thief-catching purposes, the terrible Forresters. Not by that door in Charlotte Row. Don’t you see the handsome carriage, with the fat, brown, gaudily harnessed horses drawn up before it, and the superb powdered footmen sucking their bamboo-cane tops? How odd it is that you can always tell the difference between a footman appertaining to one of the high civic dignitaries, and the flunkey of a real patrician. The liveries, on a drawing-room day, for instance, are equally rich, equally extravagant in decoration, and absurd in fashion; both servitors sport equally large cocked-hats, equally long canes, and have an equal amount of powder dredged over their heads; yet, on either flunkey’s brow are the stigmata “East” or “West” of Temple Bar, stamped as legibly as the brand of Cain. The door in Charlotte Row is his Lordship’s private entrance; and her Ladyship is very probably at this moment preparing to go out for an airing. Not by that other lateral door in George Street—that low-browed, forbidding-looking portal. That is the prisoners’ entrance. There the grim cellular van brings and waits for the victims of Themis. There it sets down and takes up, if not the chief actors, at least those who are most deeply interested in the moving drama which is every day enacted in the police tribunal of the Mansion House.

So—up this broad, roomy flight of granite steps on the Lombard Street side of the Mansion House frontage—on through a double barrier of swing-doors at the corresponding angle beneath the portico; and in less time than it would take to accept a bill (an operation in comparison to the celerity of which a pig’s whisper is an age, and the pronunciation of the mystic words “Jack Robinson” a life-long task), we are within the sanctuary of municipal justice. The first thing that strikes the stranger, accustomed as he may be to frequenting other police-courts, is the unwonted courtesy of the officials, and their gorgeous costumes. About Bow Street, Lambeth, Westminster, there hangs an indefinable but pervading miasma of meanness and squalor. A settled mildew seems to infest the walls and ceiling, a chronic dust to mantle the furniture and flooring. No one connected with the court, officially or otherwise, with the single exception of the Magistrate—who, always smug and clean shaven, and in a checked morning neckerchief and a high shirt collar, looks like a judicial edition of Major Pendennis—seems to have had his clothes brushed for a week or his boots blacked for a month. A dreadful jail-bird odour ascends from the ill-favoured auditory. The policemen are shabby in attire and morose in manner. The buckles of their belts are dull, and their buttons tarnished. They hustle you hither and thither, and order you in or out in a manner most distressing to your nerves; and the gloomy usher thrusts a ragged Testament into your hands, and swears you as though he were swearing _at_ you. But at the Mansion House there is a bluff, easy-going, turtle-and-venison-fed politeness generally manifest. You enter and you emerge from the court without being elbowed or shoved. The city policemen are more substantial-looking, well to do, and better natured men than their metropolitan _confrères_. Some of them have the appearance of small freeholders, and others, I am sure, have snug sums in the savings’ banks. As to the jailers, ushers, court-keepers, warrant-officers, marshalmen, and other multifarious hangers-on of civic justice, they are mostly men of mature age, rosy, bald and white-headed sages, who remember Sir John Key and the great Sir Claudius Hunter, and mind the time when Mr. Alderman Wood rode on horseback at the side of Queen Caroline’s hearse, on the occasion of the passage of that injured lady’s funeral procession through the city. As to their attire, it is positively—if I may be allowed the use of a barbarism—“splendiferous.” Stout broadcloth, bright gilt buttons, with elaborate chasings of civic heraldry, scarlet collars, with deep gold lace: none of your paltry blue blanketing, horn buttons, and worsted gloves. No doubt, when in full uniform, the “splendiferous” functionaries all wear cocked-hats. Maybe, feathers. There is one weazened creature who flits in and out of a side door, to the left of the Lord Mayor’s chair, and is perpetually handing up printed forms to his Lordship or to the chief clerk. I don’t know exactly what he is, whether the Lord Mayor’s butler, or the sword-bearer’s uncle, or the city-marshal’s grandfather, or the water-bailiff’s son-in-law; but the front of his coat is profusely ornamented with bars of gold braid, like pokers from Crœsus’s kitchen, and on his shoulders he wears a pair of state epaulettes, the which give him somewhat of a military appearance, and, contrasting with his civilian spectacles and white neckcloth, would produce an effect positively sublime if it were not irresistibly ludicrous. The home of Beadledom—its last home, I am afraid, after the exhaustion of the Windsor uniform, and that of the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House—will be at the Mansion House.

The architect who has contrived the new Justice-room in this stately edifice must have been, if not a man of genius, at least one of original conceptions. The old police-court—sacred to the manes of Mr. Hobler—was simply a Cave of Trophonius and Den of Despair. There was no light in it—“only darkness visible;” and when you peered at the misty prisoner in the dock, you were always reminded of Captain Macheath in his cell, when the inhuman Mr. Lockit wouldn’t allow him any more candles, and threatened to clap on extra fetters in default of an immediate supply on the captain’s part of “garnish” or jail fees. But the Palladio who has arisen to remedy these defects has contrived to introduce a considerable amount of light—only it labours under the trifling disadvantage of being all in the wrong place. The Lord Mayor, with his back to the window, sits in a reflected light, just as does Wilkie’s portrait of the Duke of York; and the fine effect of the city arms carved on his chair, to say nothing of his Lordship’s gold chain and furred robe, is thereby totally lost. Mr. Goodman and the clerks, who are all very gentlemanly-looking individuals, much given to all-round collars and parting their hair down the middle, fill up commitments and make out summonses in a puzzling haze of chiaro oscuro; the reporters are compelled to pore over their “Times” with their noses close to the paper (for no one ever saw a police reporter do anything save read the newspaper, though we are sure to read a verbatim narrative of the case in which we are interested next day), and the general audience is lost in a Cimmerian gloom. To make amends, there is plenty of light on the ceiling, and some liberal patches of it on the walls, and a generous distribution of its bounty on the bald heads, golden epaulettes, and scarlet collars of the marshalmen. We can’t have everything we want, not even in the way of Light. Let us be thankful that there is some of it about, even as it behoves us to be exceedingly grateful that there is such a vast amount of wealth in the world. Other people possess it—only, we don’t.

This, then, is the justice-room of the Mansion House. I have not given you, _seriatim_, a George Robins’s catalogue of its contents, but by bits and bits I trust you will have been enabled to form a tolerably correct mind-picture of its contents. My Lord Mayor in the chair, clerks before him, reporters to the right, marshalmen left; spectacled official at the desk in the left-hand corner—the summoning officer, I think—audience not too tightly packed into a neat pen at the back of the court; dock in the centre, and the prisoner—Ah! the prisoner!

Did it never strike you, in a criminal court of assize—“the judges all ranged, a terrible show,” the solemn clerk of the arraigns gazing over the indictment, the spectators almost breathless with excited curiosity, rays from opera glasses refracted from the gallery, Regent Street bonnets and artificial flowers relieving the dark mass of the menfolk’s dress, the bar bewigged, the eloquent advocate for the defence thundering forth genteel philippics against the eloquent counsel for the prosecution—did it never strike you, I say, what a terrible fuss and bother, and calling on Jupiter to lift a wagon wheel out of a rut, what a waste of words, and show, and ceremonial all this became, when its object, the End to all these imposing means, was one miserable creature in the dock, with spikes, and rue, and rosemary before him, accused of having purloined a quart pot? As for the prisoner who is this day arraigned before the mighty Lord Mayor—but first stand on tiptoe. There he is, God help him and us all! a miserable, weazened, ragged, unkempt child, whose head, the police reports will tell us to-morrow, “scarcely reached to the railing of the dock.” He has been caught picking pockets. It is not his first, his second, his third offence. He is an incorrigible thief. The great Lord Mayor tells him so with a shake of his fine head of hair. He must go to jail. To jail with him. He has been there before. It is the only home he ever had. It is his preparatory school for the hulks. The jail nursing-mother to thousands, and not so stony-hearted a step-mother as the streets. He is nobody’s child, nobody save the police knows anything about him, he lives nowhere; but in the eyes of the law he is somebody. He is a figure in a tabular statement, a neat item to finish a column in a report, withal. He is somebody to Colonel Jebb and Mr. Capper of the Home Office, and, in the end, the Ordinary of Newgate, the sheriffs, and, especially, somebody to CALCRAFT. He is somebody to whip, somebody to put to the crank, and into “punishment jackets,” and to “deprive of his bed and gas,” and gag, and drench with water, and choke with salt, and otherwise torture _à la mode de_ Birmingham (Austin’s improved method), somebody to build castellated jails for, somebody to transport, somebody to hang.

There are reformatories, you say, for such as these. Yes, those admirable institutions do exist; but do you know, O easily-satisfied optimist! that police magistrates every day deplore that reformatories, niggardly subsidised by a State grudging in every thing but jails, and gyves, and gibbets, are nine tenths of them full, and can receive no more inmates, even though recommended to them by “the proper authorities?” But the streets are fuller still of strayed lambs, and though wolves devour them by the score each day, the tainted flock of lost ones still increases and increases.

I must tell you, that before the “case of wipes,” as an irreverent bystander called the _procès_ of the pickpocket, was gone into (a good-for-nothing rascal that _filou_, deservedly punished, of course), what are called the night charges were disposed of. As I shall have something to say of the manners and customs of these night charges at another hour in the morning and in another place, I will content myself with informing you now, that a blue bonnet and black silk velvet mantle, charged with being drunk and disorderly in Cheapside the night before, were set at liberty without pecuniary mulct, it being her, or their, first offence; but a white hat with a black band, surmounting a rough coat, cord trousers, and Balbriggan boots, who had fought four omnibus conductors, broken eighteen panes of glass, demolished sundry waiters, and seriously damaged the beadle of the Royal Exchange (off duty, and enjoying the _dulce deripere in loco_ in the shape of cold whiskey-and-water in a shady tavern somewhere up a court of the Poultry)—all in consequence of their (or his) refusal to pay for a bottle of soda-water, was fined in heavy sums—the aggregate cost of his whistle being about six pounds. The white hat was very penitent, and looked (the face under it likewise) very haggard and tired, and, in addition to his, or its, or their penalty, munificently contributed half a sovereign to the poor box. My Lord Mayor was severe but paternal, and hoped with benignant austerity that he might never see the white hat there again; in which hope, and on his part, I daresay the white hat most cordially joined.

I never could make out what they are always doing with paupers at the Mansion House. I never pay his Lordship a visit without finding a bevy of the poor things pottering about in a corner under the care of some workhouse official, and being ultimately called up to be exorcised or excommunicated, or, at all events, to have something done to them, under the New Poor Law Act. This morning there are at least a dozen of them, forlorn, decrepit, shame-faced, little old men, cowering and shivering, although the day is warm enough, in their uncomfortable-looking gray suits. Pauper females seem to be at a discount at the Mansion House, save when, brazen-faced, blear-eyed, and dishevelled, they are dragged in droves to the bar to be committed to Holloway prison, for a month’s hard labour, for shivering innumerable panes of glass, throwing cataracts of gruel about, and expressing an earnest desire to lacerate with sharp cutlery the abdominal economy of the master of the City of London Union. Of incarnations of male impecuniosity, there is a lamentable plenty and to spare.

The pickpocket is succeeded by a distinguished burglar, well known in political—I beg pardon, in police—circles. There is no absolute charge of felony against him at present, and the only cause for his appearance to-day is his having been unfortunate enough to fall in with an acquaintance, who knew him by sight, in the shape of a city police-constable, who forthwith took him into custody for roaming about with intent to commit a felony. My Lord having heard a brief biographical sketch of his career, and being satisfied that he is a “man of mark” in a felonious point of view, sends him to Holloway for three months, which, considering that the fellow has committed, this time, at least, no absolute crime, seems, at the first blush, something very like a gross perversion of justice, and an unwarrantable interference with the liberty of the subject. When subsequently, however, I gather that a few inconsiderable trifles, such as a “jemmy,” a bunch of skeleton keys, a “knuckle duster,” and a piece of wax candle, all articles sufficiently indicative of the housebreaker’s stock-in-trade, have been found in his possession, I cease to quarrel with the decision, and confess that my burglarious friend’s incarceration, if not in strict accordance with law, is based on very sound principles of equity. After the housebreaker, there are two beggar women and a troop of ragged children—twenty-one days; and a most pitiable sight to see and hear—beggar woman, children, and sentence, and their state of life into which it has _not_ pleased Heaven to call, but cruel and perverse man to send them. Then an Irish tailor who has had a slight dispute with his wife the night before, and has corporeally chastised her with a hot goose—a tailor’s goose, be it understood—to the extent of all but fracturing her skull. He is sent for four months’ hard labour, which is rather a pleasurable thing to hear, although I should derive infinitely more delectation from the sentence if it included a sound thrashing.

But, holloa! we have been here three-quarters of an hour, and it is close upon one o’clock. Come, my red-whiskered friend, I think we have had enough of the Mansion House Justice-room. Let us make a bow to his Lordship, and evaporate. You want some lunch, you say—you are hungry now; well, let us go and lunch accordingly; but where?

I mentioned Garraway’s and the Cock. There is the Anti-Gallican, famous for soups. There is Birch’s, with real turtle, fit for Olympian deities to regale upon. There is Joe’s in Finch Lane, if you feel disposed for chop or steak, sausage or bacon, and like to see it cooked yourself on a Brobdignagian gridiron. No: you want something simple, something immediate; well, then, let us go to the Bay Tree.

I never knew exactly the name of the street in which the Bay Tree is situated. I know you go down a narrow lane, and that you will suddenly come upon it, as a jack-in-the-box suddenly comes upon you. The first time I was taken there was by a friend, who, just prior to our arrival at the house of refection, took me up a dark entry, showed me a small court-yard, and, at its extremity, a handsome-looking stone building. _That is Rothschild’s_, he said, and I thought I should have fainted. I am not a City man, and when I come eastward, it is merely (of course) to make a morning call on my friend the Governor of the Bank of England, or the Secretary for India for the time being, at his palace in Leadenhall Street. When I travel in foreign parts, my brougham (of course) takes me to the London Bridge Terminus. Authors never come into the City now-a-days, save to visit their bankers or their publishers. Authors ride blood horses, dine with dukes, and earn ten thousand a year. Such, at least, is the amount of their income surmised to be by the Commissioners of Income Tax, when they assess them arbitrarily and at such a figure their opposing creditors declare their revenue should be estimated, when they petition the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors.

I never sat down in the Bay Tree; though its premises include, I believe, vast apartments for smoking and punch-bibbing purposes. I never looked one of the innumerable assistants (are they barmen or barmaids?) in the face. I was always in such a hurry. All I know of the establishment is, that it is a capital place to lunch at, and that everything is very excellent and very cheap; and that the thousands who resort to it between eleven and three, always seem to be in as desperate a hurry as I am.

ONE P.M.—DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON.

This modest series of papers brought me, at the time of their composition, into great trouble, which was very nearly resulting in my complete discomfiture. Perhaps the severest of my trials was having to write the book at all, possessing, as is my misfortune, of course, a constitutional disinclination for the avocation to which I have devoted myself (as a _gagne pain_, or bread-winning mean). I didn’t so much mind the ladies and gentlemen, who, since the commencement of the periodical in which these articles were originally published—ladies and gentlemen personally quite unknown to me—who overwhelmed me with correspondence; some denouncing, others upbraiding, many ridiculing, and a few—a very few—eulogising yours to command. I didn’t so much object to the attentions of those professional begging-letter writers, who are good enough to include authors in their list of possible contributaries, and who were profuse lately in passionate appeals (in bold, clerkly hands) for pecuniary assistance; for though, like Bardolph, I have nothing, and cannot even coin my nose for guineas, or my blood for drachmas, it is not the less flattering to a man’s minor vanities to receive a begging letter. I can imagine an old pauper out for a holiday, coming home to the workhouse, quite elated at having been accosted in the street by a mendicant, and asked for a halfpenny. I could bear with equanimity—nay, could afford to smile at—the people who went about saying things (who _are_ the people who go about saying things, I wonder!) who ingeniously circulated reports that I was dead; that I wrote these papers under a pseudonym; that they were plagiarisms from some others written twenty years ago; and that I never wrote them at all. I disregarded such insinuations serenely; for who among us is exempt from such bald chat? The very stupidest have their Boswells—the very meanest have those to envy them, as well as the Great and Learned! There are people at this very moment, who are going about saying that Jones has pawned his plate, that the bailiffs are in Thompson’s country house, that Robinson has written himself out, that Brown has run away with Jenkins’s wife, that Muggins has taken to brandy-and-water, that Simpkins murdered Eliza Grimwood, that Larkins cut Thistlewood’s head off, and that Podgers was tried at the Old Bailey, in the year ’thirty-five, for an attempt to set the Thames on fire. But I was infinitely harassed while the clock was ticking periodically—the efforts I had to make to keep it from running down altogether!—by the great plague of “Suggesters.” From the metropolitan and suburban postal districts, from all parts of the United Kingdom—the United Kingdom, pshaw! from the Continent generally, and from across the broad Atlantic (fortunately, the return mail from Australia was not yet due)—suggestions poured in as thickly as letters of congratulation on one who has just inherited a vast fortune. If there had been five hundred in lieu of four-and-twenty hours in “Twice Round the Clock,” the Great Suggestions I received had stomach for them all. The Suggesters would take no denial: I was bound under terrific penalties to adopt, endorse, carry out, their hints,—else would they play the dickens with me. I _must_ have a sing-song meeting for nine p.m.; the committee of a burial club at ten; the dissecting-room of an hospital at eleven; a postal receiving-house, a lawyer’s office, a rag, bones, and bottle shop, the tollgate of Waterloo Bridge, and the interior of a Hammersmith ’bus, at some hour or other of the day or night. The Suggestions were oral as well as written. Strange men darted up on me from by-streets, caught at my button with trembling fingers, told me in husky tones of their vast metropolitan experience, and impressed on me the necessity of a graphic tableau of Joe Perks, the sporting barber’s, at one o’clock in the morning. Low-browed merchants popped from shady shell-fish shops, and, pointing to huge lobsters, asked where they could send the crustaceous delicacies with their compliments, and how excellent a thing it would be to give a view of the aristocracy supping at Whelks’s celebrated oyster and kippered salmon warehouse after the play. And, finally, a shy acquaintance of mine, with a face like an over-ripe Stilton cheese, and remotely connected with the Corporation of London—he may be, for aught I know, a ticket-porter in Doctors’ Commons, or a hanger-on to the water bailiff—favoured me with an occult inuendo that a word-picture of the Court of Common Council will be the very thing for four p.m., fluttering before my dazzled eyes a phantom ticket for the Guildhall banquet. In vain I endeavoured to convince these respectable Suggesters, that the papers in question were not commenced without a definite plan of action; that such plan, sketched forth years since, duly weighed, adjusted, and settled, after mature study and deliberation, not only so far as I am concerned, but by “parties” deeply learned in the mysteries of London Life, and versed in the recondite secret of pleasing the public taste, had at length been put into operation, and was no more capable of alteration than were the laws of the Medes and Persians. But all to no purpose did I make these representations. The Suggesters wouldn’t be convinced; their letters continued to flow in. They found out my address at last (they have lost it now, ha, ha!), and knocked my door down; bringing me peremptory letters of introduction from people I didn’t know, or didn’t care five farthings about, or else introducing themselves boldly, in the “Bottle Imp” manner, with an implied “You must learn to love me;” they nosed me in the lobby, and saw me dancing in the hall, and my only refuge at last was to go away. Yes; the pulsations of time had to beat behind the dial of a clock in the rural districts; and these lines were written among the hay and the ripening corn, laughing a bitter laugh to think that the postman was toiling up the quiet street in London with piles of additional suggestions, and that the Suggesters themselves were waiting for me in my usual haunts, in the fond expectation of a button to hold, or an ear to gloze suggestions within.

I tried the sea-shore; but found London-super-Mare sweltering, stewing, broiling, frying, fizzing, panting, in the sun—like Marseilles, minus the evil odours—to such an extent, and so utterly destitute of shade, that I was compelled to leave it. The paint was blistering on the bright green doors; the shingly pavement seemed to cry out “Come and grill steaks on me!” the pitch oozed from the seams of the fishing-boats; the surf hissed as it came to kiss the pebbles on the beach; the dial on the pier-head blazed with concentric rays; the chains of the suspension bridge were red hot; the camera obscura glared white in the sunshine; the turf on the Steyne was brown and parched, like a forgotten oasis in a desert; the leaves on the trees in the pavilion gardens glittered and chinked in the summer breeze, like new bright guineas; the fly-horses hung their heads, their poor tongues protruding, their limbs flaccid, and their scanty tails almost powerless to flap away the swarms of flies, which alone were riotous and active of living creation, inebriating themselves with saccharine suction in the grocers’ shops, and noisily buzzing their scanmag in private parlours; the flymen dozed on their boxes; the pushers of invalid perambulators slumbered peacefully beneath the hoods of their own Bath chairs; the ladies in the round hats found it too hot to promenade the cliff, and lolled instead at verandahed windows, arrayed in the most ravishing of muslin morning wrappers, and conversed languidly with exquisites, whose moustaches were dank with moisture, and who had scarcely energy enough to yawn. The captivating amazons abandoned for the day their plumed hats, their coquettish gauntlets, their wash-leather sub-fusk garments with the straps and patent-leather boots, and deferred their cavalcades on the skittish mares till the cool of the evening; the showy dragoon officers confined themselves, of their own free will, to the mess-room of their barracks on the Lewes road, where they sipped sangaree, smoked fragrancias, read “Bell’s Life,” and made bets on every imaginable topic. The hair of the little Skye terriers no longer curled, but hung supine in wiry hanks; the little children made piteous appeals to their parents and guardians to be permitted to run about without anything on; the two clerks at the branch bank, who are sleepy enough in the coldest weather, nodded at each other over the ledgers which had no entries in them. The only sound that disturbed the drowsy stillness of the streets was the popping of ginger-beer corks; and the very fleas in the lodging-houses lost all their agility and vivacity. No longer did they playfully leap—no longer archly gyrate; they crawled and crept, like their low relatives the bugs, and were caught and crushed without affording the slightest opportunity for sport. It was mortally hot at London-super-Mare, and I left it. Then I tried that English paradise of the west, Clifton; but woe is me! the Downs were so delightful; the prospect so exquisitely lovely; the Avon winding hundreds of feet beneath me, like a silver skein, yet bearing big three-masted ships on its bosom; the rocks and underwood so full of matter for pleasant, lazy cogitation, that I felt the only exertion of which I was capable, to be writing sonnets on the Avon and its sedgy banks, or making lame attempts at pre-Raphaelite sketches in water-colours; or thinking about doing either, which amounts to pretty nearly the same thing. So I came away from Clifton too, and hung out my sign HERE. (It is THERE now: swallows have come and gone, snows have gathered and melted, babies prattle now who were unborn and unthought of then.) Ye shall not know where Here was situated, oh, ye incorrigible Suggesters. No more particular indices of its whereabouts will I give, even to the general public, than that close to my study was a dry skittle-ground, where every day—the hotter the better—I exercised myself with the wooden “cheese” against the seven and a-half pins which were all that the dry skittle-ground could furnish forth towards the ordinary nine; that over-against this gymnastic course was an _étable_, a “shippon,” as they call it in the north, where seven cows gravely ruminated; and that, at the end of a yard crowded with agricultural implements which old Pyne alone could draw, there was a Stye, from which, looking over its palings,

“All start, like boys who, unaware,
Ranging the woods to find a hare,
Come to the mouth of some dark lair:
Where, growling low, a fierce old bear
Lies amid bones and blood.”

Not that any fierce or ancient member of the ursine tribe resided therein; but that it was the residence of a horrific-looking old sow, a dreadful creature, that farrowed unheard-of families of pigs, that lay on her broadside starboard the live-long day, winking her cruel eye, and grunting with a persistent sullenness. The chief swineherd proudly declared her to be “the viciousest beast as ever was,” and hinted darkly that she had killed a Man. The chief swineherd and I were friends. He was my “putter-up” at skittles, and did me the honour to report among the neighbouring peasantry, that “barrin’ the gent as cum here last autumn, and was off his head” (insane, I presume); I was “the very wust hand at knock-’em-downs he ever see.” It is something to be popular in the rural districts; and yet I was not three miles distant from the Regent Circus.

* * * * *

My eyes are once again turned to the clock face. It is One o’Clock in the Afternoon, and I must think of London. Come back, ye memories: open Sesame, ye secret chambers of the brain, and let me transport myself away from the dry skittle-ground, the seven grave cows and the vicious sow, to plunge once more into the toil and trouble of the seething, eddying Mistress City of the world.

There are so many things going on at one o’clock in the day; the steam of life is by that time so thoroughly “up,” that I am embarrassed somewhat to know which scenes would be the best to select from the plethora of tableaux I find among my stereoscopic slides. One o’clock is the great time for making business appointments. You meet your lawyer at one; you walk down to the office of the newspaper you may happen to write for, and settle the subject of your leading article, at one. One o’clock is a capital hour to step round to your stockbroker, in Pope’s Head Alley, Cornhill, and do a little business in stocks or shares. At one o’clock the Prime Minister, or his colleagues, have resignation enough to listen (with tolerable patience) to some half dozen deputations who come to harangue them about nothing in particular; at one o’clock obliging noblemen take the chair at public meetings at the Freemasons’, or the London Tavern. At one o’clock—from one to two rather—the aristocracy indulge in the sumptuous meal known as “lunch.” At one o’clock that vast, yet to thousands unknown and unrecked of city, which I may call Dock London, is in full activity after some twenty minutes’ suspension while the workmen take _their_ lunch.

The ingenious and persevering artist who constructed that grand model of Liverpool, which we all remember in the Exhibition of 1851, and which is now in the Derby Museum of the city of the Liver, did very wisely in making the Docks the most prominent feature in his model, and treating the thoroughfares of the town merely as secondary adjuncts. For the Docks are in reality Liverpool, even as the poet has said that love is of man’s life a part, but woman’s whole existence. Our interest in the Queen of the Mersey commences at Birkenhead, and ends at Bramley Moore Dock, on the other side. I say Bramley Moore Dock, because that was the last constructed when I was in Liverpool. Some dozens more may have been built since I was there. Docks are like jealousy, and grow continually by what they feed on. We can ill afford to surrender so noble a public building as St. George’s Hall, so thronged and interesting a thoroughfare as Dale Street; yet it must be confessed that the attention of the visitor to Liverpool is concentrated and absorbed by the unrivalled and magnificent docks. So he who visits Venice, ardent lover of art and architecture as he may be, gives on his first sojourn but a cursory glance at the churches and palaces; he is fascinated and engrossed by the canals and the gondolas. So the stranger in Petersburg and Moscow has at first but scant attention to bestow on the superb monuments, the picturesque costumes; his senses are riveted upon the golden domes of Tzaaks and the Kremlin. Liverpool is one huge dock; and from the landing-stage to West Derby island, everything is of the docks and docky. The only wonder seems to be that the ships do not sail up the streets, and discharge their cargoes at the doors of the merchants’ counting-houses. But in London, in the suburbs, in the West-end, in the heart of the city oft-times, what do we know or care about the docks? There are scores of members of the Stock Exchange, I will be bound, who never entered the dock gates, and those few who have paid a visit to Dock London, may merely have gone there with a tasting-order for wine. When we consider that in certain aristocratic circles it is reckoned to be rather a breach of etiquette than otherwise to know anything about the manners and customs of the dwellers on the other side of Temple Bar, even as the by-gone snob-cynic of fashion and literature professed entire ignorance as to the locality of Russell Square, and wanted to know “where you changed horses” in a journey to Bloomsbury—unless, indeed, my Lord Duke or my Lady Marchioness happen to be a partner in a great brewing and banking firm, under which circumstances he or she may roll down in her chariot to the city to glance over the quarterly balance sheet of profit; when we consider that this world of a town has cities upon cities within its bosom, that in the course of a long life may never be visited; when we think of Bermondsey, Bethnal Green, Somers Town, Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Hackney, Stepney, Bow, Rotherhithe, Horsleydown—places of which the great and titled may read every day in a newspaper, and ask, languidly, where they are,—we need no longer be surprised if the Docks are ignored by thousands, and if old men die every day who have never beheld their marvels.

Coming home from abroad often, with an intelligent foreigner, I persuade him to renounce the Calais route and the South-Eastern Railway, and even to abjure the expeditious run from Newhaven. I decoy him on board one of the General Steam Navigation vessels at Boulogne, and when his agonies of sea-sickness have, in the course of half a dozen hours or so, subsided—when we have passed Margate, Gravesend, Erith, Woolwich, Greenwich even—when I have got him past the Isle of Dogs, and we are bearing swiftly on our way towards the Pool—I clap my intelligent foreigner on the back, and cry, “Now look around (Eugène or Alphonse, as the case may be); now look around, and see the glory of England. Not in huge armies, bristling with bayonets, and followed by monstrous guns; not in granite forts, grinning from the waters like ghoules from graves; not in lines of circumvallation, miles and miles in extent; not in earthworks, counter-scarps, bastions, ravelins, mamelons, casemates, and gunpowder magazines—shall be found our pride and our strength. Behold them, O intelligent person of foreign extraction! in yonder forest of masts, in the flags of every nation that fly from those tapering spars on the ships, in the great argosies of commerce that from every port in the world have congregated to do honour to the monarch of marts, London, and pour out the riches of the universe at her proud feet.” After this flourishing exordium—the sense of which you may have heard on a former occasion, for it forms part of my peroration on the grandeur of England, and, if my friends and acquaintances are to be believed, I bore them terribly with it sometimes—I enter into some rapid details concerning the tonnage and import dues of the port of London; and then permit the intelligent foreigner to dive down below again to his berth. Sometimes the foreign fellow turns out to be a cynic, and declares that he cannot see the forest of masts for the fog, if it be winter—for the smoke, if it be summer.

But the docks of London—by which, let me be perfectly understood, (I do not, by any means, intend to confine myself to the London Docks) I speak of Dock London in its entirety: of the London and St. Katherine’s, of the East and West India, and the Victoria Docks—what huge reservoirs are they of wealth, and energy, and industry! See those bonding warehouses, apoplectic with the produce of three worlds, congested with bales of tobacco and barrels of spices; with serons of cochineal, and dusky, vapid-smelling chests of opium from Turkey or India; with casks of palm-oil, and packages of vile chemicals, ill-smelling oxides and alkalis, dug from the bowels of mountains thousands of miles away, and which, ere long, will be transformed into glowing pigments and exquisite perfumes; with shapeless masses of india rubber, looking inconceivably dirty and nasty, yet from which shall come delicate little cubes with which ladies shall eraze faulty pencil marks from their landscape copies after Rout and Harding—india rubber that shall be spread over our coats and moulded into shoes, yea, and drawn out in elastic ductility, to form little filaments in pink silk ligatures—I dare not mention their English appellation, but in Italian they are called “_legaccie_”—which shall encircle the bases of the femurs of the fairest creatures in creation; with bags of rice and pepper, with ingots of chocolate and nuggets and nibs of cocoa, and sacks of roasted chicory. The great hide warehouses, where are packed the skins of South American cattle, of which the horns, being left on the hides, distil anything but pleasant odours, and which lie, prone to each other, thirsting for the tan-pit. See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with sugar in casks, and bags, and boxes.[4] How many million cups of tea will be sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined! how many tomesful of gossiping scandal will be talked to the relish of those saccharine dainties! what stores of barley-sugar temples and Chantilly baskets for the rich, of brandyballs and hardbake for the poor, will come from those coarse canvas bags, those stained and sticky casks! And the huge tea warehouses, where the other element of scandal, the flowery Pekoe or the family Souchong, slumbers in tinfoiled chests. And the coffee warehouses, redolent of bags of Mocha and Mountain, Texan and Barbadian berries. And the multitudinous, almost uncataloguable, mass of other produce: shellac, sulphur, gum-benzoin, ardebs of beans and pulse from Egypt, yokes of copper from Asia Minor; sponge, gum-arabic, silk and muslin from Smyrna; flour from the United States; hides, hams, hemp, rags, and especially tallow in teeming casks, from Russia and the Baltic provinces; mountains of timber from Canada and Sweden; fruit, Florence oil, tinder, raw cotton (though the vast majority of that staple goes to Liverpool), indigo, saffron, magnesia, leeches, basket-work, and wash-leather! The ships vomit these on the dock quays, and the warehouses swallow them up again like ogres. But there is in one dock, the London, an underground store, that is the Aaron’s rod of dock warehouses, and devours all the rest. For there, in a vast succession of vaults, roofed with cobwebs many years old, are stored in pipes and hogsheads the wines that thirsty London—thirsty England, Ireland, and Scotland—must needs drink. What throats they have, these consumers! what oceans of good liquor their Garagantuan appetites demand! Strange stories have been told about these docks, and the thirsty souls who visit them with tasting-orders; how the brawny coopers stride about with candles in cleft sticks, and, piercing casks with gimlets, pour out the rich contents, upon the sawdust that covers the floor, like water; how cases of champagne are treated as of as little account as though they were cases of small beer; how plates of cheese-crumbs are handed round to amateurs that they may chasten their palates and keep them in good tone of taste; how the coopers are well nigh infallible in detecting who are the tasters that visit these “wine vaults” with a genuine intention of buying, and who the epicureans, whose only object in visiting the London Docks is to drink, gratuitously on the premises, as much good wine as they can conveniently carry. Strange, very strange stories, too, are told of the occasional inconvenience into which the “convenient carriage” degenerates; of respectable fathers of families appearing in the open street, after they have run the tether of the tasting-order, staggering and dishevelled, and with bloodshot eyes, their cravats twisted round to the backs of their necks like bagwigs, and incoherently declaring that cheese always disagreed with them. I am candidly of opinion, however, that the majority of these legends are apocryphal, or, in the rare cases when they have a foundation in fact, belong to the history of the past, and that commercial sobriety, in the highest order, is the rule in the wine vaults of the London Docks.

But the Ships! Who shall describe those white-sailed camels? who shall tell in graphic words of the fantastic interlacing of their masts and rigging, of the pitchy burliness of their bulging sides; of the hives of human ants who in barges and lighters surround them, or swarm about their cargo-cumbered decks? Strange sight to see, these mariners from every quarter of the globe; of every variety of stature and complexion, from the swarthy Malay to the almost albino Finn; in every various phase of picturesque costume, from the Suliote of the fruitship, in his camise and capote, to the Yankee foremast-man in his red shirt, tarry trousers, and case-knife hung by a strand of lanyards to his girdle. But not alone of the maritime genus are the crowds who throng the docks. There are lightermen, stovedores, bargees, and “lumpers;” there are passengers flocking to their narrow berths on board emigrant ships; there are entering and wharfingers’ clerks travelling about in ambulatory counting-houses mounted on wheels; there are land rats and water rats, ay, and some that may be called pirates of the long-shore, and over whom it behoves the dock policemen and the dock watchmen to exercise a somewhat rigid supervision—for they will pick and steal, these piratical ne’er-do-weels, any trifle, unconsidered or not, that comes handy to their knavish digits; and as they emerge from the dock-gates, it is considered by no means a breach of etiquette for an official to satisfy himself, by a personal inspection of their garments, that they don’t happen to have concealed about them, of course by accident, such waifs and strays as a bottle of Jamaica rum, a lump of gutta percha, a roll of sheet copper, or a bundle of Havannah cigars.

But a clanging bell proclaims the hour of one, and the dock-labourers, from Tower Hill to the far-off Isle of Dogs, are summoned back to their toil. Goodness and their own deplenished pockets only know how they have been lunching, or on what coarse viands they have fed since noon. Many have not fed at all; for, of the motley herd of dock-labourers, hundreds, especially in the London Docks—where no recommendation save strength is needed, and they are taken on their good behaviour from day to day—are of the Irish way of thinking; and, wonderfully economical, provident, self-denying are those much maligned Hibernians when they are earning money. They are only spendthrifts and indolent when they have nothing. They will content themselves with a fragment of hard, dry bread, and the bibulous solace of the nearest pump, and go home cheerfully at dusk to the unsavoury den—be it in Whitechapel or in Bloomsbury or in far-off Kensington, for they prefer strangely to live at the farthest possible distance from their place of daily toil—where their ragged little robins of children dwell like so many little pigs under a bed. And there they will partake of a mess of potatoes, with one solitary red herring smashed up therein, to “give it a relish.” They will half starve themselves, and go as naked as the police will permit them to go; but they will be very liberal to the priest, and will scrape money together to bring their aged and infirm parents over from the “ould country.” That is folly and superstition, people will say. Of course, what people say must be right.