informing the jury, in confidence, that she is “very hard o’ hearin’.”
“His Lordship wants to know what you will take?” asks the counsel again;
this time bawling as loud as ever he can in the old lady’s ear.
“I thank his lordship kindly,” the ancient dame answers stoutly, “and if
it’s no illconwenience to him, _I’ll take a little warm ale_!”
And, amid a roar of laughter from the spectators, we quit the Court of
Queen’s Bench.
Nor must we linger, either, beneath William Rufus’s carved roof-tree,
so ingeniously heightened, and otherwise transmogrified, by Sir Charles
Barry and his satellites. This is a different Westminster Hall to that
which I knew in my childhood, just after the great fire of ’34. There
was no great stained glass window at the end then, no brazen Gothic
candelabra, no golden House of Lords in the corridor beyond, where the
eye is dazzled with the gilding, the frescoes, the scarlet benches and
rich carpets, and where the Lord High Chancellor sits on the woolsack,
like an allegory of Themis in the midst of a blaze of fireworks. In my
time, the keeper of her Majesty’s conscience and the Great Seal sat in
a panelled room, like a dissenting chapel. Let us hasten forth from the
Great Hall, for it is full of memories. I spoke of famous footsteps on
the Mall, St. James’s; how many thousand footsteps—thousands?—millions
rather, have been lost here in fruitless pacing up and down! Westminster
Hall is always cool: well it may be so; the dust was laid and the air
refrigerated centuries since by the tears and the sighs of ruined
suitors. What a wondrous place the old hall is! what reminiscences it
conjures up—they will _not_ be laid in the Red Sea—of the gorgeous
banquets of the Plantagenets, of the trials of Laud and Strafford,
and of Laud and Strafford’s master; of Mr. Jonathan Wild’s ancestor
walking the hall with a straw in his shoe; of poor little Lady Jane
Grey and Guildford Dudley, her husband, standing their trial here on a
velvet-covered platform in the midst of the hall, for treason to Bloody
Mary. Did they ever cut a state prisoner’s head off in Westminster Hall,
I wonder, as they did Mary Stuart’s in the hall at Fotheringay? The place
is large enough.
* * * * *
[Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK A.M.: INTERIOR OF THE QUEEN’S BENCH PRISON.]
Once again I stand within the precincts of the Queen’s Bench; but where
is my Lord Owlett, where the bewigged barristers and the jury-box with
the “twelve honest men” within wiping their semperperspiring foreheads?
I am standing in the centre of a vast gravelled area, bounded on
the south side by a brick wall of tremendous height, and crowned by
those curious arrangements of geometrical spikes known as _chevaux de
frise_. To the north there is a range of ordinary-looking houses, the
numbers of which are painted very conspicuously in white characters on
a black ellipse above the doors, about which, moreover, there is this
peculiarity, that they are always open. If you peep through the yawning
portals, you will see that the staircases are of stone, and that the
roofs of the rooms on the ground-floor are vaulted. There are no barred
windows, no bolts, bars, or grim chains apparent, though from the back
windows of these houses there is a pleasant prospect of another high
wall, equally surmounted with _chevaux de frise_. When the spider
has got the fly comfortably into his web, and has satisfied himself
that he can’t get out, I daresay that he does not take the trouble to
handcuff him. In the midst of this gravelled area stands a pump, known
as the “Dolphin;” to the right of this institution, and somewhat in the
back-ground, is a great square building, called the “State House.” The
rooms here are double the size to those in the houses I have alluded
to, and are accorded by the governor of the place as a matter of favour
to those inmates of the—well, the college—who can afford to fill them
with a sufficient quantity of furniture. Close to the State House is a
strong iron gateway, through which the guardians of the college have a
strong disinclination to allow the under-graduates to pass, unless they
be furnished with a certain mysterious document called “a discharge.”
The guardians themselves are ruddy men with very big keys; but they
seem on the very best terms with the gentlemen whose intended exercise
outside the walls they feel compelled (doubtless through solicitude
for their precious health) to debar, and are continually bidding them
“good morning” in the most affable manner; it being also one of their
idiosyncrasies to rub their noses with the handles of the big keys while
going through the salutation. In days not very remote there were certain
succursals, or chapels of ease, to the college, in the shape of dingy
tenements in the borough of Southwark, extending as far as the Elephant
and Castle; and in these tenements, which were called the “Rules,” such
collegians as were in a position to offer a fantastic guarantee entitled
a “Bail Bond,” were permitted to dwell, and thence they wrote letters
to their friends and relations, stating that the iron was entering into
their souls, and that they were languishing—well, never mind where—in
college. These “rules” were abolished in the early years of her present
Majesty’s reign; and at the same time a stern Secretary of State
prohibited the renewal of a notable saturnalia called “a Mock Election,”
of which no less celebrated an artist than Haydon painted a picture (he
was himself a collegian at the time), which was bought, for considerably
more than it was worth, by King George IV. The saturnalia was fast
falling into desuetude by itself; but the Home Secretary also interfered
to put a stop to the somewhat boisterous conviviality which had reigned
among those collegians who had money, from time immemorial, and which
had converted the Queen’s Bench into a den of the most outrageous and
disgraceful dissipation and revelry. Under the present not very stringent
regulations (considering what a _carcere duro_ is, the other _alma
mater_ of Whitecross Street, to say nothing of the hideous place called
Horsemonger Lane), the collegians are restricted to the consumption of
one quart of beer—which they may have just as strong as ever they like—or
one imperial pint of wine, per diem, at their option; yet it is a very
curious fact, that no collegian who was flush of cash was ever found
to labour under any difficulty in providing sufficient refreshment for
his friends when he gave a wine party in his room. The payment of rent
is unknown in the college; and it is but rarely that the time-honoured
system of “chummage,” or quartering two or mere collegians in one room,
and allowing the richest to pay his companions a stipulated sum to go out
and find quarters elsewhere, is resorted to. As a rule, the collegian on
his arrival, after spending one night in a vaulted apartment close to
the entrance, and which bears a strong resemblance to the Gothic vault
described in “Rookwood”—an apartment known as the “receiving ward”—has
allotted to him, by solemnly-written ticket, a whitewashed chamber of
tolerable size, moderately haunted by mice, and “passably” infested by
fleas. Straightway there starts up, as it were from the bowels of the
earth, a corpulent female rubicund in countenance, tumbled in garments,
and profuse in compliments, assuring him that he is the very “Himage
of the Markis of Scatterbrass, which his aunt let him out by composing
with his creditors,” or “Capting Spurbox, of the Hoss Guards, as ’ad
champagne hevery mornin’, and went through the court payin’ nothink.”
She, for a small weekly stipend—say, five shillings—agrees to furnish
your room; and in an astonishingly short space of time you find the
bare cube transformed into a sufficiently comfortable bed-room and
sitting-room. For eighteenpence a week extra you may have a double green
baize door with brass nails, like a verdant coffin, and white dimity
curtains to your windows, with real tassels. In the train of the stout
tumbled female, there always follows a gaunt woman of no particular age,
with ropy hair, a battered bonnet, and scanty garments apparently nailed
to her angular form, who expresses, with many curtsies, her desire to
“do for you.” Don’t be alarmed; she simply means that for three or four
shillings a week she will clean your room, boil your kettle, and bring up
the dinner, which has been cooked for you in the common kitchen of the
college. She, too, has an acolyte, a weazened old man in a smock frock
and knee shorts (though I think that he must be dead or have left college
by this time[3]) who for a shilling a week will make your boots shine
like mirrors; who resides here, and has resided here for many years,
because he can’t or won’t pay thirty pounds, and who is reported to be
worth a mint of money. So here the collegian lives, and makes as merry as
he can under adverse circumstances. The same tender precautions adopted
by the authorities of the college to prevent the unnecessary egress
of those in _statu pupillari_, are enforced to preserve a due state
of morality among them. There is a chapel, as there is an infirmary,
within the walls; the lady collegians, of whom there is always a small
number in hold, are kept in jealous seclusion. Dicing and card-playing
are strictly prohibited, and contumacious contravention of the rules
involves the probability of the recalcitrant student being immured in a
_locus penitentiæ_ called the “Strong Room.” There he is kept for four
and twenty hours, _without tobacco_. Horrible punishment! This is in the
college attached to her Majesty’s Bench. Pshaw! Why should I beat about
the Bench, or the bush, any longer, or even endorse the quibble adopted
by those collegians who wish to have their letters addressed to them
genteelly, of “No. 1, Belvidere Place?” That which I have been describing
is a debtors’ jail—the Queen’s Prison, in fact.
And what of the collegians—the prisoners—themselves? It is ten o’clock
in the morning, and they are sauntering about in every variety of shabby
deshabille, smoking pipes after their meagre breakfasts, walking arm
in arm with one another, or with friends who have come to see them,
and whose ingress is permitted from nine a.m. until seven p.m. None
are allowed to enter after that hour; but those visitors already in
are allowed to stop till nine in the evening. Some of the collegian
prisoners, poor fellows, have women and little children with them, who
are very silly and sentimental, in their illogical way; but you may
depend on it that, in nine out of ten of these groups, the staple theme
of conversation is the probability of the captive being “out next week.”
They are always going to be out next week, these caged birds; but they
die sometimes in the Bench, for all that.
Don’t you think, too, that it would be as graceful as expedient to draw
a veil over these broken-down men? Even the felons in Pentonville are
allowed to wear masks in the exercise-yard. Why should I, whose sternest,
strongest aim it is to draw from Life, and from the life only, but who
wish to pluck the mote from no man’s eye, to cast a stone at no glass
house built on the pattern of mine own, expatiate in word-pictures upon
the dilapidated dandies, the whilom dashing bucks in dressing-gowns out
at elbows, and Turkish caps with tassels, set, with a woe-begone attempt
at jaunty bearing, on one side, the decayed tradesmen, the uncertificated
bankrupts, the cankers of a calm world and a long peace, that prowl and
shuffle through the yards of a debtors’ prison? Why, every man of the
world has acquaintances, if not friends, there. Why, poor old Jack, who
gave the champagne dinners we were so glad to be invited to, has been in
the Bench for months. Yonder broken-winged butterfly, relapsing, quite
against the order of nature, into a state of grubhood again, may have
gone through his Humanities with the best of us, and may say _Hodie mihi,
cras tibi_. To-day he is in jail; but to-morrow I, you, my brother the
millionaire, may be taken in execution; and who shall say that we shall
have the two pounds twelve wherewith to purchase the _habeas corpus_?
ELEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.—TROOPING THE GUARD, AND A MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE.
I have the fortune, or misfortune, to live in a “quiet street,” and am
myself an essentially quiet man, loving to keep myself in the Queen’s
peace, and minding my own business, though devoutly wishing that people
would not mind it for me in quite so irritating a degree. I sleep soundly
when in health, and never question Mrs. Lillicrap’s mystifying items in
her weekly bill, of “mustard, vinegar, and mending,” or “pepper, postage
stamps, and mother-o’-pearl buttons.” I never grumble at the crying of
babies, remembering that a wise and good doctor once told me that those
dear innocents pass the days of their nonage in a chronic state of
stomach-ache and congestion of the brain, and console myself with that
thought. I can even support, without much murmuring, the jangling of
the pupils’ piano at Miss Besom’s establishment for young ladies, next
door. Distance, and a party-wall, lend enchantment to the sound, and I
set no more store by it than I do by the chirruping of the birds in the
town-bred foliage at the extremity of Buckingham Street, or the puffing
and snorting of the halfpenny steamboats at the “Fox-under-the-Hill.” I
am so quiet, that I can allow the family of a distant blood-relation to
reside in the parlours for twelve months, without troubling myself about
their health; and I never yet rebelled at the perverse orthography of the
washerwoman, who persists in spelling my half-hose thus: “Won pare sox.”
When I die, I hope that they will lay me in a very quiet church-yard in
Kent, that I know, where some one who cared for me has been mouldering
away peacefully these four years, where the clergyman’s blind white
pony will browse upon the salad that I am eating by the roots; where
the children will come and have famous games—their silver voices and
pattering feet upon the velvet turf make out a pleasant noise, I wot;
and where they will write “_Requiescat in pace_” upon my gravestone; if,
indeed, I leave maravedis enough behind me for Mr. Farley to cut me an
inscription withal.
Yet, quiet as I am, I become at Eleven o’Clock in the Morning on every
day of the week save Sunday a raving, ranting maniac—a dangerous lunatic,
panting with insane desires to do, not only myself but other people, a
mischief, and possessed, less by hallucination than by rabies. For so
sure as the clock of St. Martin’s strikes eleven, so sure does my quiet
street become a pandemonium of discordant sounds. My teeth are on edge
to think of them. The “musicianers,” whose advent from Clerkenwell and
the East-end of London I darkly hinted in a preceding chapter, begin
to penetrate through the vaster thoroughfares, and make their hated
appearance at the head of my street. First Italian organ-grinder,
hirsute, sunburnt, and saucy, who grinds airs from the “Trovatore” six
times over, follows with a selection from the “Traviata,” repeated
half a dozen times, finishes up with the “Old Hundredth” and the
“Postman’s Knock,” and then begins again. Next, shivering Hindoo, his
skin apparently just washed in walnut juice, with a voluminous turban,
dirty white muslin caftan, worsted stockings and hob-nailed shoes,
who, followed by two diminutive brown imps in similar costume, sings
a dismal ditty in the Hindostanee language, and beats the tom-tom
with fiendish monotony. Next comes a brazen woman in a Scotch cap, to
which is fastened a bunch of rusty black feathers, apparently culled
from a mourning coach past service. She wears a faded tartan kilt,
fleshings, short calico trews, a velveteen jacket, tin buckles in her
shoes, and two patches of red brick-dust on her haggard cheeks, and
is supposed to represent a Scottish highlander. She dances an absurd
fling, interpolated occasionally with a shrill howl to the music of
some etiolated bagpipes screeded by a shabby rogue of the male sex, her
companion, arrayed in similar habiliments. Next come the acrobats—drum,
clarionet, and all. You know what those nuisances are like, without
any extended description on my part. Close on their heels follows the
eloquent beggar, with his numerous destitute but scrupulously clean
family, who has, of course, that morning parted with his last shirt.
Then a lamentable woman with a baby begins to whimper “Old Dog Tray.”
Then swoop into the street an abominable band of ruffians, six in
number. They are swarthy villains, dressed in the semblance of Italian
goatherds, and are called, I believe, _pifferari_. They play upon a kind
of bagpipes—a hideous pig-skin-and-walking-stick-looking affair, and
accompany their droning by a succession of short yelps and a spasmodic
pedal movement that would be a near approach to a sailor’s hornpipe, if
it did bear a much closer resemblance to the war-dance of a wild Indian.
Add to these the Jews crying “Clo’!” the man who sells hearthstones,
and the woman who buys rabbit-skins, the butcher, the baker, and the
boys screaming shrill Nigger melodies, and rattling pieces of slate
between their fingers in imitation of the “bones,” and you will be able
to form an idea of the quietude of our street. From the infliction of
the soot-and-grease-bedaubed and tambourine-and-banjo-equipped Ethiopian
serenaders, we are indeed mercifully spared; but enough remains to turn a
respectable thoroughfare into a saturnalia.
I can do nothing with these people. I shout, I threaten, I shake my fist,
I objurgate them from my window in indifferent Italian, but to no avail.
They defy, scorn, disregard, make light of me. They are encouraged in
their abominable devices, not merely by the idlers in the street, the
servant-maids gossiping at the doors, the boys with the baskets, and
the nurse children, but by the people at the windows, who seem to have
nothing to do but to look from their casements all day long. There is
an ancient party of the female persuasion opposite my humble dwelling,
who was wont to take intense interest in the composition of my literary
essays. She used to bring her work to the window at first; but she never
did a stitch, and soon allowed that flimsy pretext to fall through,
and devoted herself with unaffected enjoyment to staring at me. As I
am modest and nervous, I felt compelled to put a stop to this somewhat
too persevering scrutiny; but I disdained to adopt the pusillanimous
and self-nose-amputating plan of pulling down the window blinds. I
tried taking her portrait as she sat, like an elderly Jessica, at the
casement, and drew horrifying caricatures of her in red chalk, holding
them up, from time to time, for her inspection; but she rather seemed
to like this last process than otherwise; and I was obliged to change
my tactics. The constant use of a powerful double-barrelled Solomon’s
race-glass of gigantic dimensions was first successful in discomposing
her, and ultimately routed her with great moral slaughter; and she now
only approaches the window in a hurried and furtive manner. I daresay
she thinks my conduct most unhandsome. She and the tall man in the long
moustaches at number thirteen, all the pupils at the ladies’ school next
door, the two saucy little minxes in black merino and worked collars at
number nine, and that man with the bald head shaped like a Dutch cheese,
in the parlour at number nine, who is always in his shirt sleeves, drums
with his fingers on the window panes, and grins and makes faces at the
passers-by, and whom I conscientiously believe to be a confirmed idiot,
are all in a league against me, and have an alliance, offensive and
defensive, with the musical _canaille_ below. They cry out “Shame” when I
remonstrate with those nuisances: they shout and jeer at me when I sally
forth from the door, and make rabid rushes at the man with the bagpipes:
they inquire derisively whether I consider myself lord of the creation?
I am tempted—desperately tempted—to avail myself of my rights as a
Civis Romanus, to summon the aid of the police, and to give one of the
grinders, howlers, or droners in charge. Mr. Babbage, the arithmetician,
does it; why should not I? What progress can I make in “Twice Round the
Clock” in the midst of this hideous din? But then I remember, with much
inward trouble, that I have in public committed myself more than once
in favour of street music—that I have laughed at the folly of putting
down bagpipes and barrel-organs by act of Parliament. I remember, too—I
hope in all its force and Truth—a certain axiom, that the few must
always suffer for the enjoyment of the many—that we are not all sages in
decimals and logarithms—or people writing in books and newspapers—that
the sick, the nervous, the fastidious, and the hypochondriacal, are but
drops of water in a huge ocean of hale, hearty, somewhat thick-skinned
and thick-eared humanity, who like the noisy vagabonds who are my
bane and terror in the quiet street, and admire their distressing
performances. Some men cannot endure a gaping pig; to many persons the
odour of all roots of the garlic family is intolerable. I hate cats. I
had an aunt who said that she could not “abide” green as a colour. Yet
we should not be justified, I think, in invoking the terrors of the
legislature against roast pork, onions, cats, and green peas. Mr. Babbage
must pursue his mathematical calculations in a study at the back of his
house, and I must hie me to the Reading-room of the British Museum, or
turn out for a stroll.
And in this stroll, which, if the weather be fine, almost invariably
leads towards one or other of the parks, I am frequently permitted
to witness the imposing ceremony of “trooping the guard” in the
Palace-yard, St. James’s. Why her Majesty’s Foot Guards should be
“trooped” at eleven o’clock in the morning, and in what precise
evolutions the operation of “trooping” consists, I am unable to state.
Eleven o’clock, too, does not seem always a rigidly adhered-to hour; for,
on the mornings of the days consecrated to our “Isthmian games,” to the
cosmopolitan Derby, and the more aristocratic, but equally attractive
Ascot Cup, the time taken is nine instead of eleven, doubtless for the
convenience of the heavy guardsmen, who, with heavy cigars protruding
from their heavy moustaches, and heavy opera-glasses slung by their
sides, go solemnly down to the races in heavy drags.
To the uninitiated, “trooping the guard” appears to consist in some
hundred and fifty grenadiers in full uniform, their drums and fifes and
their brass band at their head, marching from the Horse Guards, across
the parade ground, and along the Mall to the Palace-yard, where the
Queen’s colours are stuck into a hole in the centre, where the officer on
guard salutes them, where the other officers chat in the middle of the
quadrangle, and where officers and men, and a motley crowd of spectators,
listen to the enlivening strains of the brass band playing selections
from the popular operas of the day. No complicated manœuvres seem to be
performed; the automaton-like inspection of the “troops” takes place on
the other side of the park; and when the colours are firmly fixed, and
left in charge of a sentry, the “troops” file off again, the officers
repairing to their clubs, and the soldiers to their barracks, while the
brass bandsmen at once subside into private life, and become civilians of
decidedly Cockney tendencies.