Chapter IX: Part 9

It is time, if you will excuse my mentioning it, that we should quit this labyrinth of avenues between triple-laden stalls, all crowded with ladies and children, whose voluminous _jupons_—the very babes and sucklings wear crinoline now—render locomotion inconvenient, not to say perilous. Pass the refreshment counter, where they sell the arrowroot cakes, which I never saw anywhere else, and let us enter the conservatory—a winter garden built long ere Crystal Palaces or Jardins d’Hiver were dreamt of, and which to me is as pleasant a lounge as any that exists in London: a murmuring fountain, spangled with gold and silver fish, and the usual number of “winking bubbles beading at the brim;” and good store of beautiful exotic plants and myriad-hued flowers. The place is but a niche, a narrow passage, with a glass roof and a circle at the end, where the fountain is, like the bulb of a thermometer; but to me it is very delightful. It is good to see fair young faces, fair young forms, in rainbow, rustling garments, flitting in and about the plants and flowers, the fountain and the gold fish. It is good to reflect how much happiness and innocence there must be among these pretty creatures. The world for them is yet a place for flirting, and shopping, and dancing, and making themselves as fair to view as they and the looking-glass and the milliner can manage. The world is as yet a delightful Pantheon, full of flowers—real, wax, and artificial, and all pleasant—sandal-wood fans, petticoats with worked edges, silk stockings, satin shoes, white kid gloves, varnished broughams, pet dogs, vanille ices, boxes at the opera, tickets for the Crystal Palace, tortoise-shell card-cases, enamelled visiting-cards, and scented pink invitation notes, with “_On dansera_” in the left-hand bottom corners, muslin slips, bandoline, perfumes, ballads and polkas with chromo-lithographed frontispieces, and the dear delightful new novels from Mudie’s with uncut leaves, and mother-o’-pearl paper knives with coral spring handles to cut them withal. They have kind mammas and indulgent port-wine papas, who bring them home such nice things from the city. They sit under such darling clergymen, with curls in the centre of their dear white foreheads; they have soft beds, succulent dinners, and softly-pacing hacks, on which to ride in coquettish-looking habits and cavalier hats. John the footman is always anxious to run errands for them; and their additional male acquaintance is composed of charming creatures with white neckcloths, patent leather boots, irreproachable whiskers, and mellow tenor voices. Oh! the delightful world; sure, it is the _meilleur des mondes possible_, as Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss maintained. It is true that they were at school once, and suffered all the tyranny of the “calisthenic exercises” and the French mark, or were, at home, mewed up under the supervision of a stern governess, who set them excruciating tasks; but, oh! that was such a long time since, they were so young then—it was ever such a long time ago. You silly little creatures! it was only the day before yesterday, and the day after to-morrow——. But “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” and regard not old Time as he is a-flying. For my part, I will mingle no drop of cynicism in the jewelled cup of your young enjoyment; and I hope that the day after to-morrow, with unkind husbands and ungrateful children, with physic-bottles and aches and pains, and debts and duns, may never come to you, and that your pretty shadows may never be less.

You see that I am in an unusual state of mansuetude, and feel for the nonce inclined to say, “Bless everybody”—the Pope, the Pretender, the Pantheon, the pretty girls, and the sailors’ pig-tails, though they’re now cut off. Every sufferer from moral _podagra_ has such fits of benevolence between the twinges of his gout. But the fit, alas! is evanescent; and I have not been ten minutes in the conservatory of the Pantheon before I begin to grumble again. I really must shut my ears in self-defence against the atrocious, the intolerable screeching of the parrots, the parroquettes, the cockatoos, and the macaws, who are permitted to hang on by their wicked claws and the skin of their malicious beaks to the perches round the fountain. The twittering of the smaller birds is irritating enough to the nervously afflicted; but the parrots! ugh! that piercing, long-continued, hoarse shriek—it is like a signal of insane communication given by a patient at Hanwell to a brother lunatic at Colney Hatch. The worst of these abominable birds is, that they cannot or will not talk, and confine themselves to an inarticulate gabble. However, I suppose the fairest rose must have its thorns, and the milkiest white hind its patch of darker colour; so it is incumbent on us, in all charity, to condone the ornithological nuisance which is the main drawback to a very pretty and cheerful place of resort. Only, I should like to know the people who buy the parrots, in order that I might avoid them.

As we entered by Oxford Street, with its embeadled colonnade, it becomes our bounden duty to quit the building by means of that portal which I assumed to have been in days gone-by the stage-door of the pig-tail opera-house, and which gives egress into Great Marlborough Street. I can’t stand the parrots; so, leaving my aunt (I wish she would lend me a hundred pounds), and my cousin (I wish she would lend me a kiss, and more sincerely do I wish that either of them existed in the flesh, or elsewhere but in my turbid imagination); leaving these shadowy relatives genteelly bargaining (they have already purchased a _papier maché_ inkstand and a coral wafer-stamp), I slip through the conservatory’s crystal precincts, inhale a farewell gust of flower-breeze, pass through a waiting-room, where some tired ladies are resting till their carriages draw up, and am genteelly bowed out by affable beadle No. 2.

And now, whither away? Shall I cross the road, and commence the first of a series of six lessons in dancing from Miss Leonora Geary? Shall I visit the harp and pianoforte establishment of Messrs. Erard, and try the tone of an “upright grand?” Shall I hie me to Marlborough Street police-court, and see how Mr. Bingham or Mr. Hardwick may be getting on? No: I think I will take a walk down Regent Street (one cannot too frequently perambulate that delightful thoroughfare at the height of the season), turn off by Vigo Lane, and take a stroll—a five minutes’ stroll, mind, for I have an appointment close to St. George’s Hospital, and Mr. Decimus Burton’s triumphal arch, as soon after four as possible—down the Burlington Arcade.

I remember once refecting myself at a public dinner—the Tenth Anniversary Festival of the Hospital for Elephantiasis, I think it was—when my next neighbour to the right (to the left was a rural dean) was a gentleman in a white waistcoat that loomed large like the lateen sail of a Palermian felucca, and whose convivial countenance was of the exact hue and texture of the inside of an over-ripe fig. He took remarkably good care of himself during dinner time, had twice spring soup, and twice salmon and cucumber, led the waiters a terrible life, and gathered quite a little grove of bottles of choice wine round him. I am bound to say that he was not selfish or solitary in his enjoyment, for he pressed a peculiar Sautern upon me, and an especial Chateau Lafitte (the landlord must have known and respected him), with a silver label hanging to its bottle neck, like the badge of a Hansom cabman. He also recommended gosling to me, as being the very thing to take after lamb, in a rich husky voice, that did one good to hear. At the conclusion of the repast, after we had dabbled with the rosewater in the silver-gilt shield, which it is the custom to send round, and which nobody knows exactly what to do with—I always feel inclined to upset it, for the purpose of eliciting an expression of public feeling, and clearing the atmosphere generally; and when the business of the evening, as the absurd system of indiscriminate toast-giving is termed, had commenced, and the professional ladies and gentlemen were singing something about the “brave and bearded barley” in execrable time and tune, of course in the most preposterously irrelevant connection with the health just drank—either the Army and Navy, or the two Houses of Parliament—my neighbour with the ripe fig countenance turned to me, and wiping his moist lips with his _serviette_, whispered these remarkable words: “Sir, a public dinner is the sublimation of an assemblage of superfluities.” He said no more during the evening, filled up his name, however, for a handsome amount in the subscription-list (his name was announced amid thunders of applause by the secretary, but I really forget whether he was a general or a wholesale grocer), and went away in anything but a superfluous state of sobriety. But his words sank deep into my mind, and they bring me at once to the Burlington Arcade.

Which is to me another sublimate of superfluities: a booth transplanted bodily from Vanity Fair. I don’t think there is a shop in its _enceinte_ where they sell anything that we could not do without. Boots and shoes are sold there, to be sure, but what boots and shoes? varnished and embroidered and be-ribboned figments, fitter for a fancy ball or a lady’s chamber, there to caper to the jingling melody of a lute, than for serious pedestrianism. Paintings and lithographs for gilded boudoirs, collars for puppy dogs, and silver-mounted whips for spaniels, pocket handkerchiefs, in which an islet of cambric is surrounded by an ocean of lace, embroidered garters and braces, fillagree flounces, firework-looking bonnets, scent bottles, sword-knots, brocaded sashes, worked dressing-gowns, inlaid snuff-boxes, and falbalas of all descriptions; these form the stock-in-trade of the merchants who have here their tiny _boutiques_. There are hair-dressers’ shops too; but I will be bound that their proprietors would not be content with trimming a too luxuriant head of hair. They would insist upon curling, oiling, scenting, and generally tittivating you. They would want you to buy amandine for your hands, kalydor for your hair, dentifrice, odonto, _vinaigre de toilette_, hair-brushes with ivory backs, and tortoiseshell pocket-combs with mirrors appended to them. They would insist that you could not live without _pommade Hongroise_ and _fixatures_ for the moustaches, or Frangipani for the pocket-handkerchief. I have very few ambitions, but one is to become the proprietor of a house in the Burlington Arcade, and forthwith to open a chandler’s shop in the very midst of its vanities and its whim-whams. The reproof, I trust, would be as stern, though I am afraid it would have as little effect, as that of the uncompromising patriots of the reign of terror, who planted the parterres of the Tuileries gardens with potatoes. To the end of time, I perpend, we shall have this hankering after superfluities, and little princesses will ask their governesses why the people need starve for want of bread, when there are such nice Bath buns in the confectioners’ shop windows.

But the clock of St. James’s warns me that I am due at Hyde Park Corner, and passing by yet another beadle, I emerge into Piccadilly.

FOUR P.M.—TATTERSALL’S, AND THE PARK.

Was there not a time when Hyde Park Corner was the Ultima Thule of London, and Kensington was in the country?—when Hammersmith was far away—a district known only to washerwomen and nursery gardeners—and Turnham Green and Kew were places where citizens took their wives to enjoy the perfection of ruralisation? Was it not to the Hercules’ Pillars at Hyde Park Corner that Squire Western sent his chaplain to recover the snuff-box, which the worthy landed-gentleman and justice of the peace had left there when he halted to bait? Was not Hyde Park Corner a rendezvous for highwaymen, where they listened with eagerness for “the sound of coaches;” and parted, some towards Fulham, some towards Hounslow, some towards the Uxbridge road, where they might meet full-pouched travellers, and bid them “stand and deliver?” I remember, myself, old Padlock House at Knightsbride, standing in the midst of the roadway, like Middle Row in Holborn, or the southern block of Holywell Street in the Strand, with the padlock itself fixed in the grimy wall, which, according to the legendary wishes of a mythical testator, was never to be pulled down till the lock rotted away from its chain, and the chain from the brick and mortar in which it was imbedded. The cavalry barracks at Knightsbride seemed to have been built in the year One, and we boys whispered that the little iron knobs on the wall of the line of stables, which are, it is to be presumed, intended for purposes of ventilation (though I am not at all certain about the matter yet) were miniature portholes, at which fierce troopers, with carbines loaded to the muzzle, and ready pointed, kept guard every day, in order to repel the attacks of the “Radicals.” Alack-a-day! but the “Radicals” seem to be getting somewhat the better of it at this present time of writing. Kensington High Street seemed to belong to a hamlet of immense age; the old church was a very cathedral—built, of course, by William of Wykeham; and as for Holland House, there could not be any doubt about that. It came in naturally with the Conqueror, and the first Lord Holland.

Hyde Park Corner before the battle of Waterloo must have been a strange, old-fashioned-looking place. No Apsley House: the site was occupied by the old woman who kept the apple-stall, or the bun-house, or the curds and whey shop, and who wouldn’t be bought out, save at enormous prices, by his late Grace, Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington. No triumphal arch; and, thank good taste, no equestrian statue of the late F. M. Arthur Dux, &c., on the summit thereof. No entablatured colonnade, with nothing to support, towards the Park. No Achilles statue. A mean, unpicturesque, common-place spot, I take it. What could you expect of an epoch in which the Life Guards wore cocked hats and pig-tails, the police-officers red waistcoats and top boots, when the king _de jure_ was mad, and the king _de facto_ wore a wig and padded himself? A bad time. We have a lady on the throne now who behaves as a sovereign should behave, and London grows handsomer every day.

I declare that it does; and I don’t care a fig for the cynics—most of them ignorant cynics, too—who, because they have accomplished a cheap tour to Paris, or have gone half-way up the Rhine, think themselves qualified to under-rate and to decry the finest metropolis in the world. I grant the smoke—in the city—and I confess that the Thames is anything but odoriferous in sultry weather, and is neither so blue nor so clear as the Neva; but I say that London has dozens and scores of splendid streets and mansions, such as I defy Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or St. Petersburg—I know their architectural glories by heart—to produce. I say that Pall Mall beats the Grand Canal at Venice; that Regent Street, with a little more altitude in its buildings, would put the Boulevard des Italiens to shame; and that Cannon Street makes the Nevskoi Perspective hide its diminished head. Some of these days, when I can get that balance at the banker’s I have been waiting for so long, I shall sit down and indite a book entitled, “A Defence of London, Architecturally Considered,” the which I shall publish at my own expense, as I am certain no publisher would purchase the copyright.

Take Hyde Park Corner. Between the Brandenburg Thor at Berlin and the Puerta del Sol at Madrid, you will not find a gayer, more picturesque, more sparkling scene. Ugly and preposterous as is the man in the cocked hat, who holds the rolling-pin and is wrapped in the counterpane, on the top of the arch, we are not for ever giving ourselves wry necks in the attempt to look up at him; and the arch itself is noble and grandiose. Then, opposite, through the _a giorno_ of Mr. “Anastasius” Hope’s colonnade, that supports nothing, you catch a glimpse of the leafy glories of Hyde Park—carriages, horses, horsewomen, Achilles’ statue, and all. And again, to the right of the arch, is St. George’s Hospital, looking more like a gentleman’s mansion than an abode of pain; and to the left the ever-beautiful, ever-fresh, and ever-charming Green Park. And then far away east stretches the hill of Piccadilly, a dry Rialto (only watch it at night, and see the magical effects of its double line of gas-lamps); and westward the new city that the Londoners have built after their city was finished, beyond the Ultima Thule. Magnificent lines of stately mansions, towering park gates, bring us to the two gigantic many-storeyed edifices at Albert Gate, which were for a long time christened “Gibraltar,” because they were supposed to be impregnable, no tenant having been found rich or bold enough to “take them.” Taken they both were at last, however. The further one, or at least its lower portion, has been for a considerable period occupied by a banking company; while the near one—ah! that near Gibraltar, has had two strange tenants—the representatives of two strange fortunes. There dwelt the Railway King, a gross, common, mean man, who could not spell very well, Rumour said: but to him—being king of iron roads and stuffed with shares even to repletion, such shares being gold in those days, not dross—came the nobles of the land, humbling themselves on their gartered knees, and pressing the earth with their coroneted brows, and calling him King of Men, that he might give them shares, which he gave them. So this gross man was “hail fellow well met” with the nobles, and was drunk at their feasts and they at his, and he sat in the Parliament House, and made laws for us; and when he sent out cards of invitation, the wives and daughters of the nobles rose gladly in the night season, and having painted their faces and bared their necks, and put tresses of dead men’s hair on their heads, they drove in swift chariots to Albert Gate, and all went merry as a marriage bell.

“But, hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”

It was indeed the great knell of universal railway smashdom, the St. Sepulchre’s boom of found-out humbug. So down went the Railway King, and down into the kennel toppled the iron crown—not so much of Lombardy, this time, as of those Lombards whose arms are three golden spheres. An iron crown to moralise over, that; and of which, as of a red-hot halfpenny, the motto reads appositely—“_Guai a chi la tocca_,” “Woe be to him who touches it.”

Albert Gate, the near house, yet saw lighted rooms, and great revelry and feasting, and a brave tenant; no other than Master Fialin Persigny, Ambassador of France. Courtly, witty, _rusé_ Persigny Fialin! the nobles and princes were as glad to come to his merry-makings as in the old time, when the now broken-down Railway Stag held high court there. Crafty Fialin! he must have rubbed his hands sometimes, with a sly chuckle, as, from the upper chambers of his splendid house, he tried to descry, far off at Kensington, a now waste spot where once stood GORE HOUSE. And, oh! he must have sung—“What a very fine thing it is to be Ambassador-in-law to a very magnificent three-tailed Bashaw of an Emperor, and to live at Albert Gate.” Not so many years since, though, master and man were glad to take tea at Gore House, with the beautiful Woman who wrote books, and the handsome Count who painted portraits; when the Bashaw’s bills were somewhat a drug in the discount market, and his ambassador did not precisely know how to make both ends meet. All of which proves that the world is full of changes, and that fortune is capricious, and that master and man have made an uncommonly good thing of it.

Don’t be afraid of a sudden raid on my part towards the lands that lie beyond Brentford. My present business lies close to Hyde Park Corner, close to St. George’s Hospital. We have but to turn down Lower Grosvenor Place, and lo and behold, we are at our destination—TATTERSALL’S.

I suppose the British Empire could not progress prosperously without Tattersall’s; so, I suppose, we must cry Tattersall’s and the Constitution! Tattersall’s and our Ancient Institutions! Tattersall’s and Liberty! And, indeed, of the last there seems in reality to be much liberty, and equality, and fraternity in all connected with horse-racing; and at Tattersall’s, though the resort of the most patrician turfites, the democratic element is appreciably strong. So long as both parties pay their bets, dukes and dustmen, Jews and jockeys, seem to meet upon a cheerful footing of “man to man” at this peculiarly national establishment.

The astute prophets who vaticinate in the Sunday newspapers, and who never can, by the remotest chance of possibility, be wrong in their calculations, are in the habit of speaking of the sporting transactions at Tattersall’s as “Doings at the Corner.” I think it would be slightly more appropriate if they were to characterise them as “Doings at the Corners,” for of corners, and a multiplicity of them, Tattersall’s seems made up. It is easy enough to distinguish the whereabouts of the great temple of horse-racing, for from Hyde Park Corner far down Grosvenor Place, you will find at FOUR O’CLOCK (business has been going on throughout the afternoon), a serried line of vehicles, with the horses’ heads towards Pimlico. Equipages there are here of every description and grade. Lordly mail phætons, the mettlesome steeds impatiently champing at the bit, and shaking their varnished, silver-mounted, crest-decorated harness; slim, trim, dainty gentlemen’s cabriolets (I am sorry to see that those most elegant of private vehicles are becoming, year after year, fewer in number), with high wheels and tall gray horses, and diminutive, topbooted tigers, squaring their little arms over the aprons; open carriages and pairs, with parasolled ladies within (for even rank and beauty do not disdain to wait at Tattersall’s while my Lord or Sir John goes inside to bet, and perhaps also to put something on the favourite for Lady Clementina or the Honourable Agnes); gigs and dog-carts, sly little broughams with rose-coloured blinds and terriers peeping from beneath them, and whose demure horses look as though they could tell a good many queer stories if they chose; taxed carts, chaise carts, and plain carts, that are carts and nothing else. I should not be at all surprised indeed to see, some fine afternoon, a costermonger’s “shallow,” donkey, greenstuff-baskets and all, drawn up before Tattersall’s, while its red ’kerchiefed, corduroyed, and ankle-jacked proprietor stepped down the yard to inquire after the state of the odds. There is, you may be sure, a plentiful sprinkling of Hansom cabs among the wheeled things drawn up. The Piccadilly cabmen are exceedingly partial to fares whose destination is Tattersall’s. Such fares are always pressed for time, and always liberal; and they say that there are few Jehus on the stand between the White Horse Cellar and Hyde Park Corner who do not stand to win or lose large sums by every important racing event.

When you arrive at a building called St. George’s School of Medicine, and at the door of which, at most times of the day, you will find lounging a knot of medical students, who should properly, I take it, in this sporting locality, have a racing and “down-the-road” look, but who, on the contrary, have the garb and demeanour of ordinary gentlemen—(What has become of the old medical student whom Mr. Albert Smith used to caricature for our amusement, with his shaggy overcoat, white hat, lank hair, short thick stick, staring shawl, short pipe, and slangy manners and conversation? Is he extinct as a type, or did he never exist, save in the lively imagination of that popular writer, and whom I hope all good luck will attend?)—When you have passed this edifice, sacred to Galen, Celsus, Hippocrates, and the rest of the Faculty of Antiquity, it will be time for you to turn down a narrow lane, very like one leading to an ordinary livery-stable, and to find yourself suddenly in a conglomeration of “corners.” At one corner stands a building with a varnished oak door, that does not ill resemble a dissenting chapel with a genteel congregation, and fronting this, screened from the _profanum vulgus_ by a stout railing, sweeps round a gravelled walk, surrounding a shaven grass-plat of circular form. This is the famous “Ring,” of which you have heard so much; and the building that resembles a dissenting chapel is none other than Messrs. Tattersall’s subscription rooms. Within those to ordinary mortals unapproachable precincts, the privacy of which is kept with as much severity as the interior of the Stock Exchange, the great guns of the turf discharge their broadsides of bets. They do not always confine themselves to the interior, however; but, when the weather is fine and betting hot, particularly on settling days, when there is an immense hubbub and excitement possessing every one connected with the turf, from the smallest stable-boy up to Lords Derby and Zetland, they come forth into the open, and bet round the grass plat. Now cast your eyes to the right (you are standing with your back to Grosvenor Place), and you will see a low archway, passing through which a hand points to you the spot where Mr. Rarey, the horse-tamer, had his office; while on the other side is a counting-house, somewhat dark and mysterious in aspect, where the names and prices of more racers and hunters than you or I ever heard of are entered in Tattersall’s bulky ledgers. Beyond the archway stretches a spacious court-yard, the centre occupied by a species of temple, circular in form, with painted wooden pillars and a cupola, surmounted by a bust of George IV. Beneath the cupola is the figure of a fox sedent and regardant, something like the dog of Alcibiades, and looking, in troth, very cunning and foxy indeed. To the right, looking from the archway, are stables, with a covered penthouse in front; to the left, another archway, with more stables and coach-houses.

Tattersall’s is a curious sight at all times, and has something pervading it quite _sui generis_. Even when the ring is deserted by the gentleman turfites, and when no sales by auction of race-horses, hunters, carriage-horses, carriages, or fox-hounds, are proceeding in the court-yard (the auctioneer’s rostrum is close to the king-crowned, fox-decorated temple), there is ample food for observation and amusement in the contemplation of the extraordinary array of hangers-on, who, at all times and seasons, summer and winter, are to be found about the purlieus of the Corner. I do not so much speak of the mere grooms, stable-boys, coachmen, and helpers, who have horses to mind or carriages to look after. You may find their prototypes down every mews, and in every livery-stable. The originals to whom I allude are to be seen only here, and on race-courses, hanging about the grand-stand and the weighing-house. They are entirely different to the nonchalant individuals who, in short coats, and a straw in their mouths, haunt the avenues of Aldridge’s Repository, in St. Martin’s Lane. They would appertain, seemingly, to a superior class; but from top to toe—laterally, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally—they are unmistakeably horse-flesh loving, and by horse-flesh living, men. It is not but you will find white neckcloths and black broadcloth in their attire, but there is a cut to the coat, a tie to the neckcloth, that prevents the possibility of error as to their vocation. They are sporting men all over. Hard-featured, serious-looking, spare-limbed men mostly, much given to burying their hands in their coat-pockets (never in their trousers), and peaceably addicted to the wearing of broad-brimmed hats. Now, the general acceptation of a “sporting” man would give him a tall, shiny hat, with a narrow brim, and considerably cocked on one side; yet I do verily believe that, were these men attired in buttonless drab, brown beavers, striped worsted hose, and buckles, that they would preserve the same sporting identity. They are the wet Quakers of the turf. What the exact nature of their multifarious functions about horses may be, I am not rightly informed. I conjecture them to be trainers, country horse-dealers, licensed victuallers with a turn for sporting, gentlemen farmers who “breed a colt” occasionally, or, maybe, perfectly private individuals led by an irresistible penchant to devote themselves to the study and observation of horses, and led by an uncontrollable destiny to hang, their lives-long through, about the Corner. Hangers-on of a lower grade there are in plenty. Striped-sleeved waistcoats, corduroy or drab cloth smalls and leggings; nay, even the mighty plush galligaskins of coachmanhood, top boots, fur and moleskin caps, sticks with crutches and a thong at the end, to serve, if needful, as whips; horseshoe scarf pins, and cord trousers made tight at the knees, and ending in laced-up boots. These—the ordinary paraphernalia of racing attire—are to be met with at every step; while the bottommost round of the sporting ladder is to be found in a forlorn creature in a stained ragged jerkin, that once was scarlet, matted hair, and naked feet. _He_ hangs about the entrance, calls everybody “captain,” and solicits halfpence with a piteous whine. I suppose he is a chartered beggar, licensed to pursue his harmless mendicancy here. Perhaps he may have kept hounds and harriers, carriages and horses—may have spent ten thousand a year, gone to the dogs, and turned up again at Tattersall’s. Who knows? You had better give him the benefit of the doubt, and, commiserating his ragged-robin appearance, bestow sixpence on him.

Now let us take a peep at the magnates who are jotting down the current state of the odds in betting-books. Look at them well, and wonder. Why, all the world’s a ring, and all the men and women in it merely betters. To come more nearly towards exactitude, it seems as though a good portion of at least the male part of the community had sent representatives to Tattersall’s, while the genuine sporting element does not seem by any means so strong as you might reasonably expect. The genus “swell,” with his long surtout, double-breasted waistcoat, accurately-folded scarf, peg-top trousers, eyeglass, umbrella, and drooping moustache, is perhaps predominant. And our friend the “swell” is indeed a “welcome guest,” in the “ring,” for he has, in the majority of instances, plenty of money, is rather inclined to bet foolishly—not to say with consummate imbecility—so long as his money lasts he pays with alacrity, and it takes a long time to drain him dry even at betting, which is a forcing engine that would empty another Lake of Haarlem of its contents in far less time than was employed to drain the first.

Your anxious sporting man, with lines like mathematical problems in his shrewd face, is not of course wanting in the assemblage. Here, too, you shall see the City dandy, shining with new clothes and jewellery, who has just driven down from the Stock Exchange to see what is going on at “Tat’s,” and who is a member of the “Ring” as well as of the “House.” But those, perhaps, who seem the most ardent in their pursuit of the fickle goddess, as bearing on the Doncaster St. Leger, are certain florid elderly gentlemen, in bright blue body coats, with brass buttons and resplendent shirt-frills, and hats of the antique elegant or orthodox Beau Brummel form and cock.

Such is the outward aspect of the Ring. Into its penetralia, into the mysteries of its combinations, I, rash neophyte, do not presume to inquire. They are too awful for me. I am ignorant of them, nor, if I knew, should I dare to tell them. I should expect the curtain of the temple to fall down and overwhelm me, as befell the rash stranger who ventured to watch from, as he thought, a secure point of espial, the celebration of the mysteries of Isis at Thebes. Besides, I never could make either head or tail of a betting-book. _Poeta nascitur non fit_, say the Latins. _On devient cuisinier mais on nait rôtisseur_—“One may become a cook, but one is born a roaster,” say the French; and I verily believe that the betting-man is to the manner born, and that if he does not feel an innate vocation for the odds, he had much better jump into a cauldron of boiling pitch than touch a betting-book—which theory I offer with confident generosity for the benefit of those young gentlemen who think it a proper thing and a fast thing to make up a book for the Derby or the Oaks, whether they understand anything about the matter or not.

To all appearances, the Ring and the Subscription-room, with the adjacent avenues for the outsiders (you should see the place on the Sunday afternoon before the Derby) are quite sufficient to take up all the accommodation which the “Corner” can afford; but there are many other things done within Messrs. Tattersall’s somewhat crowded premises. There is the auctioneering business; the sales, when whole studs are brought to the hammer, and thousands of pounds’ worth of horseflesh are disposed of in the course of a few minutes. There are the days for the sale of all manner of genteel wheeled vehicles, which have been inspected on the previous day by a committee _de haut goût_, of which ladies belonging to the _élite_ of fashion are not unfrequently members. For the cream of nobility is, oft-times, not too proud to ride in second-hand carriages.

One more episode of “Corner” life, and I must quit the queer, motley scene. Down below the Subscription-room is another corner occupied by an old-fashioned hostelry, called the “Turf Tap,” and here the commonalty of Tattersall’s frequenters are to be found at any hour of the day, occupied with the process of sustentation by liquid refreshment. And yet, though the place is almost entirely “used” by sporting men, it has very little the appearance of a “sporting” public-house. No portraits of “coaching incidents,” or famous prize-fighters, decorate its walls; no glass-cases containing the stuffed anatomies of dogs of preternaturally small size, and that have killed unheard-of numbers of rats in a minimum of minutes, ornament its bar-parlour; no loudly-boisterous talk about the last fight, or the next race coming off, echoes through its bar; and the landlord hasn’t a broken nose. The behaviour of the company is grave and decorous, almost melancholy; and on the bench outside, wary-looking stablemen, and sober grooms, converse in discreet undertone on “parties” and “events,” not by them, or by any means, to be communicated to the general public. Tattersall’s is a business-like place altogether, and even its conviviality is serious and methodical.

I think I should like to ride a horse and take a turn in Rotten Row, if I only knew how to accomplish the equestrian feat; but I am really afraid to adventure it. There are some people who do things capitally which they have never been taught; and who ride and drive, as it were, by intuition. Irishmen are remarkable for this faculty, and I do not regard as by any means a specimen of boastfulness, the reply of the young Milesian gentlemen to the person who asked him if he could play the fiddle, that he did not know, but that he dared say he could, _if he tried_. But I am afraid that the mounting of the easiest-going park hack would be too much for your obedient servant, and that the only way of insuring security, would be to get inside the animal and pull the blinds down; or, that being zoologically impossible, to have my coat skirts nailed to the saddle; or to be tied to the body of my gallant steed with cords, in the manner practised in the remotest antiquity by the young men of Scythia on their first introduction to a live horse, and their commencement of the study of equitation. I passed three days once at the hospitable mansion of a friend in Staffordshire, who, the morning after my arrival, wanted me to do something he called “riding to hounds.” I said, “Well out of it,” respectfully declined the invitation, and retired to the library, where I read Roger de Wendover’s “Flowers of History” till dinner time. I daresay the ladies, who all rode like Amazons, thought me a milk-sop; but I went to bed that night without any broken bones. I have an acquaintance, too, a fashionable riding-master at Brighton, a tremendous creature, who wears jack-boots, and has a pair of whiskers like the phlanges of a screw-propeller. He has been obliging enough to say that he will “mount” me any time I come his way, but I would as soon mount the topmost peak of Chimborazo.

I beg to state that this short essay on horsemanship is _àpropos_ of Hyde Park and notably of Rotten Row, into which I wander after quitting Tattersall’s, and where, leaning over the wooden rails, I contemplate the horsemen and horsewomen caracoling along the spongy road with admiration, not unmixed with a little envy. What a much better, honester world it would be if people would confess a little more frequently to that feeling of envy? For Envy is not always, believe me, grovelling in a cavern, red-eyed and pale-faced, and gnawing a steak sliced off her own liver. Envy can be at times noble, generous, heroic. If I see a gay, gallant, happy, ingenious boy of eighteen, and for a moment envy him his youth, his health, his strength, his innocence, the golden prospect of a sunshiny futurity, that stretches out before him, does it follow that I wish to deprive him of one of those gifts, or that I bear him malice for possessing them? I declare it does not follow. I say to him—_I, curre_! “Good luck have thou, with thine honour—ride on;” and as I go home to my garret, if I envy the bird as he sings, need I shoot him? or the dog as he lies winking and basking in the sun, need I kick him? or the golden beetle trudging along the gravel, need I trample on him? But people cry fie upon the envy that is harmless, and must needs assume a virtue if they have it not; and concerning that latter quality my private belief is, that if Virtue were to die, Hypocrisy would have to go into the deepest mourning immediately.

I am glad to say that I am not by any means alone as I lean over the rails. Whether it is that they can’t or won’t ride, I know not; but I find myself surrounded by groups of exquisites, who, to judge by their outward appearance, must be the greatest dandies in London. For once in a day, I see gentlemen dressed in the exact similitude of the emblazoned cartoons in the “Monthly Magazine of Fashion.” I had always, previously, understood those pictorial prodigies to be gross caricatures of, and libels on, at least the male portion of the fashionable world. But I find that I am mistaken. Such peg-top trousers! such astounding waistcoat patterns! such lofty heels to the varnished boots! such Brobdignagian moustaches and whiskers! such ponderous watch-chains, bearing masses of coins and trinkets! such bewildering varieties of starched, choking all-round collars! such breezy neckties and alarming scarves! Ladies, too—real ladies—promenade in an amplitude of crinoline difficult to imagine and impossible to describe; some of them with stalwart footmen following them, whose looks beam forth conscious pride at the superlative toilettes of their distinguished proprietresses; some escorted by their bedizened beaux. Little foot-pages; swells walking three, sometimes four, abreast; gambolling children; severe duennas; wicked old bucks, splendidly attired, leering furtively under the bonnets—what a scene of more than “Arabian Nights” delight and gaiety! And the green trees wave around, around, around; and the birds are on the boughs; and the blessed sun is in the heavens, and rains gold upon the beauteous Danaës, who prance and amble, canter and career, on their graceful steeds throughout the length of Rotten Row.

The Danaës! the Amazons! the lady cavaliers! the horsewomen! can any scene in the world equal Rotten Row at four in the afternoon, and in the full tide of the season? Bois de Boulogne, Course at Calcutta, Cascine at Florence, Prado at Madrid, Atmeidan at Constantinople—I defy ye all. Rotten Row is a very Peri’s garden for beautiful women on horseback. The Cliff at Brighton offers, to be sure, just as entrancing a sight towards the end of December; but what is Brighton, after all, but London-super-Mare? The sage Titmarsh has so christened it; and the beauties of Rotten Row are transplanted annually to the vicinity of the Chain Pier and Brill’s baths. Watch the sylphides as they fly or float past in their ravishing riding-habits and intoxicatingly delightful hats: some with the orthodox cylindrical beaver, with the flowing veil; others with roguish little wide-awakes, or pertly cocked cavaliers’ hats and green plumes. And as the joyous cavalcade streams past, (I count the male riders absolutely for nothing, and do not deem them worthy of mention, though there may be marquises among them) from time to time the naughty wind will flutter the skirt of a habit, and display a tiny, coquettish, brilliant little boot, with a military heel, and tightly strapped over it the Amazonian riding trouser.

Only, from time to time, while you gaze upon these fair young daughters of the aristocracy disporting themselves on their fleet coursers, you may chance to have with you a grim town Diogenes, who has left his tub for an airing in the park; and who, pointing with the finger of a hard buckskin glove towards the graceful _écuyères_, will say: “Those are not all countesses’ or earls’ daughters, my son. She on the bay, yonder, is Laïs. Yonder goes Aspasia, with Jack Alcibiades on his black mare Timon: see, they have stopped at the end of the ride to talk to Phryne in her brougham. Some of those dashing delightful creatures have covered themselves with shame, and their mothers with grief, and have brought their fathers’ gray hair with sorrow to the grave. All is not gold that glitters, my son.”

FIVE O’CLOCK P.M.—THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS’ VAN.

The English are the only “Clubable” people on the face of the earth. Considering the vast number of clubs which are more or less understood to flourish all over the Continent, and in the other hemisphere, it is within possibility that I shall be accused of having uttered something like a paradox; but I adhere to my dictum, and will approve it Truth. Not but that, concerning paradoxes themselves, I may be of the opinion of Don Basilio in the “Barber of Seville,” expressed with regard to calumny. “Calumniate, calumniate,” says that learned casuist; “calumniate, and still calumniate, _something will always come of it_.” So, in a long course of paradoxes, it is hard but that you shall find a refreshing admixture of veracity.

Do you think you can call the French a “clubable” nation, because in their revolutions of ’89 and ’48 they burst into a mushroom crop of clubs? Do you think that the gentleman whom a late complication of political events brought into connection with a committee of Taste, consisting of twelve honest men assembled in a jury-box, and whom, the penny-a-liners were kind enough to inform us, was in his own country known as “Bernard le Clubbiste,” could be by any means considered as what we called a “club-man?” Could he be compared with Jawkins or Borekins, Sir Thomas de Boots, Major Pendennis, or any of the Pall Mall and St. James’s Street bow-window loungers, whom the great master of club life has so inimitably delineated? No more than we could parallelise the dingy, garlic-reeking, revolutionary club-room on a three-pair back at the bottom of a Paris court-yard, with its “tribune,” and its quarrelsome patriots, to the palatial Polyanthus, the Podasokus or the Poluphlosboion. French clubs ever have been—and will be again, I suppose, when the next political smash affords an opportunity for the re-establishment of such institutions—mere screeching, yelling, vapouring “pig-and-whistle” symposia; full of rodomontading stump orators, splitting the silly groundlings’ ears with denunciations of the infamous oppressors of society—the society that wears pantaloons without patches, and has one-and-ninepence in its pockets; yelping for communism, equal division of property, and toothpicks, solidarity, nationalities, and similar moonshine-and-water ices; “demanding heads,” with fierce imprecations about universal fraternity, till their own troublesome bodies—for society’s mere peace and quietness’ sake—are securely shackled and straight-waistcoated up, and carted away in police-vans to deep-holded ships, whence, after much salutary sea-sickness, they are shot out on the shores of conveniently pestilential Cayennes and Nouka-Hivas. A plague on such clubs and clubbists, say I, with their long hair, flapped waistcoats, and coffee-shop treasonable practices. They have done more harm to the cause of Liberty than all the wicked kings and kaisers, from Dionysius to the late Bomba—now gone to his reward, and who is enjoying it, I should say, hot and hot by this time—have done to the true and heaven-ordained principle of royalty.

In Imperial Paris there are yet clubs of another sort existing, though jealously watched by a police that would be Argus-eyed if its members were not endowed with a centuple power of squinting. There are clubs—the “Jockey,” the “Chemin de Fer,” and establishments with great gilded saloons, and many servitors in plush and silk stockings; but they are no more like our frank English clubs than I am like Antinous. Mere gambling shops and arenas for foolish wagers; mere lounging-places for spendthrifts, sham gentlemen, gilt-fustian senators, and Imperialist patricians, with dubious titles, who haunt club-rooms, sit up late, and intoxicate themselves with alcoholic mixtures—so aping the hardy sons of Britain, when they would be ten times more at home in their own pleasant, frivolous Boulevard _cafés_, with a box of dominoes, a glass of sugar-and-water, and Alphonso the _garçon_ to bring it to them. Such pseudo-aristocratic clubs you may find, too, at Berlin and Vienna, scattered up and down north Italy, and in Russia, even, at Petersburg and Moscow, where they have “English” clubs, into which Englishmen are seldom, if ever, admitted. Some English secretaries of legation and long-legged _attachés_, have indeed an _ex-officio_ entry to these continental clubs, or “_cercles_,” where they come to lounge and yawn in the true Pall Mall fashion; but they soon grow tired of the hybrid places; and the foreigners who come to stare and wonder at them, go away more tired still, and, with droll shrugs, say, “_Que c’est triste_!” The proper club for a Frenchman is his _café_; for, without a woman to admire him or to admire, your Monsieur cannot exist; and in the slowest provincial town in France there is a _dame de comptoir_ to ogle or be ogled. The Russian has more of the clubable element in him; but clubs will never flourish in Muscovy till a man can be morally certain that the anecdote he is telling his neighbour will not be carried, with notes and emendations, in half an hour, to the Grand Master of Police. As for the German, put him in a beer-shop, and give him a long pipe with his mawkish draught, and—be he prince, professor, or peasant—he will desire no better club; save, indeed, on high convivial occasions, when you had best prepare him a cellar, where he and his blond-bearded, spectacled fellows may sit round a wine-cask, and play cards on the top thereof.

I don’t exactly know how far the English club-shoot has been grafted on the trunk of American society, but I can’t believe that the club-proper flourishes there to any great extent. I like the Americans much, recognising in them many noble, generous, upright, manly qualities; but I am afraid they are too fond of asking questions—too ignorant or unmindful of the great art of sitting half an hour in the company of a man whom you know intimately, without saying a word to him, to be completely clubable. Moreover, they are a people who drink _standing_, delighting much to “liquor up” in crowded bar-rooms, and seldom sitting down to their potations—a most unclubable characteristic. All sorts of convivial and political _réunions_ exist, I am aware, in the United States, to a high degree of organisation; and I have heard glowing accounts of the comfortable, club-like guard-rooms and stations of the New York volunteers and firemen; but I can’t exactly consider these in the light of clubs. They are not exclusive enough—not concrete enough—not subject to the rigid but salutary discipline of that _Imperium in Imperio_, or rather, _Rempublicam in Republicâ_, the committee of a club.

In England, the Ancient Order of Druids were undeniably the first clubmen, keeping things remarkably snug, and delighting much in house-dinners at the sign of the Misletoe, where a roasted Ancient Briton was no rare dish. It might aid, too, to clear up the puzzling enigma of Stonehenge—who built it, and how, and why?—if we were to look upon Druidism in a purely club-light. I should like to know whence the money came which the Megatherium or the Mastodon Clubs in Pall Mall cost to build. We know that Captain Threadbare, late of the Rifles, that the Hon. Jemmy O’Nuffin, respectively members of those grand _cénacles_, didn’t find the money; that they never paid anything towards their clubs, save the entrance fee and the subscription; and that they dine there, nine months out of the year, for eighteen-pence. Other members did, do, will do the same; yet there the club stands, stately and superb, with its columns of multi-coloured marbles, its stately halls, its sumptuous furniture, its army of liveried lacqueys. A belted earl might ruin himself in building such a mansion; yet Captain Threadbare and Jemmy O’Nuffin call it their club, and it is theirs to all intents and purposes. Cunning men, when you express excusable wonder at the thing, whisper, “Debentures!” and debentures seem in truth to have been the seven hundred times seven gifted servants, who have hoisted this Fortunio of a place to its proud position. Why should not Stonehenge have been built by debentures?

The old Saxon Wittenagemotte must have been strongly impregnated with the club element; and the resemblance of clubs to parliaments has come down to this day. What, after all, is our much-vaunted British House of Commons but a club of the first water, somewhat more exclusive than its brethren of St. James’s, and black-balling its scores of candidates every general election? It has its reading-rooms, coffee-rooms, and smoking-rooms; the members lounge in and out, and loll on forms and benches, just as they would do in Pall Mall; and while some five hundred members indulge in the real _dolce far niente_ of club life, smoking, and reading, and dawdling, and dozing, and refreshing themselves, and never troubling themselves about club matters, save when they are called upon to vote, the affairs of the club (and of the nation too, by the way) are managed by a snug little committee, who do all the work and all the talking, and are continually popping themselves into snug little berths connected with the management of that other great club which lies beyond the walls of St. Stephen’s, and is called the Country.

And the middle ages, sunk as the unthinking believe them to have been in barbarism, had their clubs, and brave ones too. Thorough clubmen were the old Freemasons; secret and sturdy, and swift in action; and it’s O! to see the club-houses they erected in the fanes that are yet the pride and glory of our cathedral towns. When you look at their crenelated towers, and at the strange sculptures in the rich spandrils of their arches, in their groins and corbels, in their buttresses and great rose windows, and cunningly-traced roodscreens and carved bench-ends, you shall find copious store of club-marks, and secret signs, and passes only known to themselves, and, grotesque and frivolous as to the uninitiated they seem, truly drawn from the innermost arcana of the great mystery of masonry. The old Vehmgericht, too, with its grim symbols, and warnings of the cord and dagger—may not that be considered as a club? The Flagellants and the Rosicrucians, were not those queer sects clubs? and what were the Council of Trent, and the Diet of Worms, but select clubs, frequented by ecclesiastical and political “swells?”

I am not about to confound the convivial club—with its one room and its quaint rules, ancient or modern—with its latest perfection, all Portland stone and plate-glass, gas chandeliers, and luxurious ottomans. Before, however, I come to the fashionable club of 1859, I may be permitted, I hope, to discourse for awhile on the jovial clubs, high, low, and middle class, which have made this metropolis cosy and picturesque for at least two centuries.