sniffing the hot, and, to some noses, fragrant breeze which is emitted
from between the gratings of an eating-house. To some the contemplation
of eel pies, smoking rounds of beef, rumpsteak pies, and pen’orths of
pudding, shining in the glory of dripping, and radiant with raisins, is
almost as satisfying as the absolute possession of those dainties. It is
certain that contented spirits do yet exist, by whom the sight of the
riches and the happiness of others is accepted as a compensation for the
wealth and the felicity which they do not themselves enjoy. It is a very
pleasant mental condition, this—to be able to stare a pastrycook’s window
out of countenance, and partake of, in imagination, the rich plum-cakes,
the raspberry-tarts, and the lobster-patties, without coveting those
dainties; to walk up Regent Street, and wear, mentally, the “ducks of
bonnets,” the Burnouse cloaks and the Llama shawls, which poverty forbids
us to purchase; to walk through the Vernon or Sheepshanks collections,
and hang up the delightful Landseers, Websters, and Mulreadys in
fantastic mind-chambers of our own; to call Hampton Court and Windsor
our palaces, and St. James’s and the Green our parks; to fancy that the
good people who have horses and carriages, and jewels, and silks, and
satins, have but a copyhold interest in them, and that the fee-simple of
all these fine things is in us. Such imaginative optimists can sit down
unmurmuringly to a Barmecide feast; the “Court Circular” pleases them
as much as an invitation to the Queen’s ball; a criticism on “Lucrezia
Borgia” at the opera delights them as much as an actual stall at Covent
Garden; and Mr. Albert Smith’s Egyptian Hall ascent of Mont Blanc, and
his more recent Chinese entertainment, are to them quite as full of
interest and adventure as a real pilgrimage to Chamouni, a toilsome
scramble up the “Grands Mulets,” a sail in a sampan on the Canton river,
or a “fightee pigeon” with the “Braves” in Hog Lane.
[Illustration: ELEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.: TROOPING THE GUARD AT ST. JAMES’S
PALACE.]
The immortal young ladies who have been occupied in their eternal
crochet-work any time since the siege of Troy, and who are called the
Fates, have decided that it is better for me to be Alone. I am condemned
for life to soliloquise. None of the young women with whom I have (to
adopt the term current in domestic service) “kept company,” would,
in the end, have anything to do with me. They were very punctual in
sending me cards—one sent me cake, but that was long ago—when they were
married. One said I squinted, another that I was ill-tempered, and a
third wondered at my impudence. Joan went off to Australia to join
her cousin the digger, who, having done well at Bendigo, had written
home for a wife, as he would for a Deans’ revolver. Sarah married the
linendraper (I am happy to state that he manifested himself stupid
and ferocious, and went, commercially, to the dogs within six months
after marriage); as for Rachel, she positively fell in love with the
tailor who came to measure me for my wedding suit, and married _him_. A
nursemaid with a perambulator nearly tripped me up the other day, and
sitting in that infantile chariot was Rachel’s eldest. Even the young
lady who sold sardines at Stettin, and who, while I was waiting three
years since for the ice to break up in the Baltic, undertook to teach
me the prettiest German I ever heard in Deutschland, evinced a decided
partiality for a certain baker with a Vandyke beard, who was a member of
the Philharmonic Society of that town on the Oder, and at length jilted
me for a trumpeter in a dragoon regiment, a burly knave in a striped
and fringed uniform, all red and yellow, like a flamingo. The heartless
conduct of the grocer’s daughter towards me has already been recorded in
print. So I am alone. Not repining, however, but taking pleasure in other
people’s children, with the additional consolation of not having their
little frocks and perambulators to pay for, and passably content to sit
on a mile-stone by the great roadside, and smoke the calumet of peace,
watching the wain of life, with youth on the box and pleasure in the
dickey, tear by, till the dust thrown up by the wheels has whitened my
hair, and it shall be time enough to think of a neat walking funeral for
One.
Now, do you understand why I alluded to the pleasures of imagination in
connection with the contemplation of cook-shops, pictures, and palaces?
Now, do you comprehend how a hopelessly solitary man—if you put a single
grain of philosophic _hachisch_ into that pacific calumet of his—can
derive so much pleasure and contentment from the sight of other folk’s
weddings? I say nothing of courtship, which, on the part of a third
party, argues a certain amount of, perhaps, involuntary eavesdropping and
espionage, but which, when the boys and girls love each other sincerely,
is as delightful a sight as the sorest of eyes, the sorest of hearts,
could desire to witness. What pretty ways they have, those simple young
“lovyers!” what innocent prattlings and rompings, what charming quarrels
and reconciliations! Edward would dance with Miss Totterdown last
night; Clara flirted most shamefully with Wertha Bjornsjertnjöe, the
Scandinavian poet, and Lady Walrus’s last lion. What confiding billings
and cooings! how supremely foolish they are! and what an abhorrent thing
is common-sense in love at all! Wondrously like ostriches, too, are
Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy. They hide their pretty heads in each other’s
bosoms, and fancy they are totally invisible. They have codes of masonic
telegraphy, as legible as Long Primer to the meanest understanding.
I reckon among my friends a professor of photography in fashionable
practice, and marvellous are the stories he has to tell of the by-play of
love that takes place sometimes in his glass studio. For you see, when,
in order to “focus” a young couple before him, he throws the curtain of
the camera over his head, Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy are apt, in the sweet
ignorance of love, to fancy that the operator can’t see a bit what is
going on; so Jenny arranges Jemmy’s hair, and gives the moustache a
twist, and there is a sly kiss, and a squeeze, and a pressure of the
foot or so, and a variety of harmless endearing blandishments, known to
our American cousins (who are great adepts at sweet-hearting) under the
generic name of “conoodling,” and all of which are faithfully transmitted
through the lens, and neatly displayed in an inverted position on the
field of the camera, to the edification of the discreet operator. Oh,
you enamoured young men and women, you don’t know that the eyes of
domestic Europe are always fixed on you, and that your pretty simperings
and whimperings form a drama which becomes the source of infinite
amusement and delight to the philosophic bystanders. And is it not much
better so, and that our lads and lasses should court in the simple,
kindly Anglo-Saxon way, than that we should adopt foreign manners, and
marry our wives, as in France, starched and prim from the convent or
the boarding-school? Away with your morose, sulky, icy, ceremonious
courtships. The Shepherd in Virgil, the moralist said, grew acquainted
with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. But he did not dwell
there in sulky solitude, I will be bound. The rock was most probably the
Rocher de Cancale, where he sat and ate _dinde truffée_, and quaffed
Chambertin, with his Psyche, in a new bonnet and cream-coloured gloves,
by his side. And they went to the play afterwards, and had merry times of
it, you may be sure.
[Illustration: ELEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.: A WEDDING AT ST. JAMES’S CHURCH,
PICCADILLY.]
I am very fond of weddings, and, to abandon for a moment the egotism
and engrossing self-sufficiency which so delightfully characterise my
sex, I fancy that the sight of the solemnisation of matrimony has equal
charms for that better part of creation, whose special vocation it is,
under all circumstances, to be married and happy, but who are oft-times,
alas! as hopelessly celibate as the Trappist. One can scarcely go to a
wedding without seeing some of these brave knights-errant, these _preux
chevalières_ of womanhood, these uncloistered nuns, these hermits in a
vale of wax lights and artificial flowers, clustering in the galleries,
or furtively ensconced in pews near the altar. They are very liberal
to the pew-openers, these kind old maids, and are always ready with
smelling-bottles if there be any fainting going on. They take their part
in the crying with praiseworthy perseverance, and echo the responses
in heartrending sobs; they press close to the bride as she comes down
the aisle on the arm of her spouse, and eye her approvingly and the
bridesmaids criticisingly; then go home, the big Church Service tucked
beneath their mantles—go home to the solitary mutton chop and bleak
shining hearth, with the cut paper pattern grinning through the bars
like a skeleton. There are some cynics who irreverently call old maids
“prancers,” and others who, with positive brutality, accuse them of
leading monkeys in a place which I would much rather not hear of, far
less mention. They are, to be sure, somewhat stiff and starched, have
uncomfortable prejudices against even the moderate use of mild cigars,
and persist in keeping hideous little dogs to snap at your ankles; but
how often would the contemptuous term “old maid,” were its reality
known, mean heroic self-sacrifice and self-denial—patience, fortitude,
unrepining resignation? No man, who is not a Caliban or Miserrimus,
need remain, his life long, a bachelor. The Siamese twins married; the
living skeleton was crossed in love, but afterwards consoled himself
with a corpulent widow; the hunch-backed Scarron found a beautiful woman
to love and nurse him; and General Tom Thumb turned benedict the other
day. But how many women—young, fair, and accomplished, pure and good and
wise—are doomed irrevocably to solitude and celibacy! Every man knows
such premature old maids; sees among a family of blooming girls one who
already wears the stigmata of old maidenhood. It chills the blood to see
these hopeless cases, to see the women resign themselves to their fate
with a sad meek smile—to come back, year after year, and find them still
meek, smiling, but sad, confirmed old maids. It is ill for me, who dwell
in quite a Crystal Palace of a glass house, to throw so much as a grain
of sand at the windows opposite, but I cannot refrain from sermonising
my fellows on their self-conceited bachelorhood. What dullards were
those writers in the “Times” newspaper about marriage and three hundred
a year! Did Adam and Eve have three halfpence a year when they married?
Has the world grown smaller? Are there no Australias, Americas, Indies?
Are there no such things as marrying on a pound a week in a top garret,
and ending in a mansion in Belgrave Square? no such things as toil,
energy, perseverance? husband and wife cheering one another on, and in
wealth at last pleasantly talking of the old times, the struggles and
difficulties? We hear a great deal now-a-days about people’s “missions.”
The proper mission of men is to marry, and of women to bear children;
and those who are deterred from marriage in their degree (for we ought
neither to expect nor to desire Squire B. to wed Pamela every day) by the
hypocritical cant about “society” and “keeping up appearances,” had much
better send society to the dogs and appearances to the devil, and have
nothing more to do with such miserable sophistries.
This diatribe, which I sincerely hope will increase the sale of
wedding-rings in the goldsmiths’ shops forty-fold, brings me naturally
to the subject of the second cartoon, by which the ingenious artist who
transcribes my inky men and women into flesh and blood, has chosen to
illustrate the hour of eleven o’clock in the morning. Here we are at a
fashionable wedding at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.
If I had the tongue or pen of Mr. Penguin, the urbane and aristocratic
correspondent of the “Morning Post,” I should give you quite a vivid,
and at the same time a refined, description of that edifying spectacle—a
marriage in high life. How eloquent, and, by turn, pathetic and humorous,
I could be on the bevy of youthful bridesmaids—all in white tulle over
pink glacé silk, all in bonnets trimmed with white roses, and with
bouquets of camelias and lilies of the valley! How I could expatiate,
likewise, on the appearance of the beauteous and high-born bride, her
Honiton lace veil, her innumerable flounces; and her noble parents, and
the gallant and distinguished bridegroom, in fawn-coloured inexpressibles
and a cream-coloured face; and his “best man,” the burly colonel of the
Fazimanagghur Irregulars; and the crowd of distinguished personages who
alight from their carriages at the little wicket in Piccadilly, and pass
along the great area amid the cheers of the little boys! They are all so
noble and distinguished, that one clergyman can’t perform the ceremony,
and extra parsons are provided like extra oil-lamps on a gala night at
Cremorne. The register becomes an autograph-book of noble and illustrious
signatures; the vestry-room has sweet odours of Jocky Club and Frangipani
lingering about it for hours afterwards; the pew-opener picks up white
satin favours tied with silver twist. A white rose, broken short off at
the stem, lies unregarded on the altar-steps; and just within the rails
are some orange-blossoms from the bride’s coronal. For they fall and die,
the blossoms, as well as the brown October leaves. Spring has its death
as well as autumn: a death followed often by no summer, but by cold and
cruel winter. The blossoms fall and die, and the paths by the hawthorn
hedges are strewn with their bright corses. The blossoms droop and die:
the little children die, and the green velvet of the cemetery is dotted
with tiny grave-stones.
See, the bridal procession comes into garish Piccadilly, and, amid fresh
cheers and the pealing of the joy-bells, steps into its carriages.
“Happy, happy, happy pair!
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave, deserve the fair.”
So sings Mr. John Dryden, whilom poet laureate. Let us hope that the
brides of St. James’s are all as fair as the bridegrooms are brave, and
that they all commence a career of happiness by that momentous plunge
into the waters of matrimony at eleven o’clock in the morning. With which
sincere aspiration, I will clap an extinguisher on the Hymeneal torch,
which I have temporarily lighted, and so to read the births, marriages,
and deaths in the “Times.”
NOON.—THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION-HOUSE, AND THE “BAY TREE.”
The red-whiskered, quick-tempered gentleman, who carried the shiny
leather bag and the bundle of sticks—umbrella and fishing-rods tied
together like the fasces of a Roman lictor—and who wore a cloak
gracefully over his forty-shilling suit of heather tweed, “thoroughly
well shrunk,” the gentleman who, at Morley’s Hotel, Trafalgar Square,
and at twenty minutes before twelve, engaged a Hansom cabman, No. 9,009,
and bade him drive “like anything” (but he said like something which I
decline to mention) to the London Bridge Terminus of the South-Eastern
Railway, has thrust his bundle of sticks, &c., through the little
trap-door in the cabriolet’s roof, and has savagely ordered the driver to
stop, or to drive him to Jericho, or to the deuce. But the high-towering
Jehu of 9,009 cannot drive to the dominions of the deuce, even as did
“Ben,” that famous Jarvey of the olden time, immortalised in the ballad
of “Tamaroo.” He can drive neither to the right nor to the left, nor
backwards nor forwards; for he is hemmed in, and blocked up, and jammed
together in the middle of the Poultry; and just as a sarcastic saloon
omnibus driver behind jeeringly bids him “keep moving,” accompanying the
behest by the aggressive taunt of “gardner;” and just as the charioteer
of the mail-cart in front affectionately recommends him not to be in
a hurry, lest he should injure his precious health, Twelve o’Clock is
proclaimed by the clock of St. Mildred’s, Poultry; and cabman 9,009 has
lost his promised extra shilling for extra speed, and the red-whiskered
gentleman has lost his temper, and the train into the bargain, and
there will be weeping at Tunbridge Wells this afternoon, where a young
lady, with long ringlets and a white muslin jacket, will mourn for her
Theodore, and will not be comforted—till the next train arrives.
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.