How many miles of daily walks have I gone over, the hand of a toddling
little sister in mine, and with strict injunctions not to stray beyond
the shadow of the columns, and with prohibitions, under dreadful menaces,
of venturing in Air Street on the one side or Vigo Lane on the other!
I wore, I remember, then, an absurd blue cloak, too short for me, and
lined with red, and with a brass clasp somewhat resembling the ornament
on a cartouch box. This cloak chafed and fretted me, and was the bane
and terror of my existence; for I knew, or fancied I knew, that every
passer-by must know that it had never been made for me, which, indeed,
it never had, having formerly been of far larger dimensions and the
property of an officer in his Majesty’s light infantry. I believe that
there was a domestic ukase promulgated for our benefit against crossing
the road; but we did cross it nevertheless, with many looks to the right
and the left, not only to secure ourselves against threatening carriage
wheels, but with reference to the possible appearance of parents and
guardians. There was a delightful bird-stuffer’s shop at the corner of
a court, with birds of paradise, parrots, and hummingbirds of gorgeous
plumage, and strange creatures with white bodies and long yellow beaks
and legs that terrified while they pleasured us. Then there was the
funeral monument shop, with the mural tablets, the obelisks, the broken
columns, the extinguished torches, and the draped urns in the window,
and some with the inscriptions into the bargain, all ready engraved in
black and white, puzzling us as to whether the tender husbands, devoted
wives, and affectionate sons, to whom they referred, were buried in
that grisly shop—it had a pleasant, fascinating terror about it, like
an undertaker’s, too. There was Swan and Edgar’s, splendid and radiant,
then as now, with brave apparel (how many times have I listened to the
enthusiastic cheers of Swan and Edgar’s young men, on the occasion of
the proprietors giving their annual banquet to their _employés_?), and
even then replete with legends of dishonest fares, who caused a cab to
halt at the Regent Street entrance, got out, said they would be back
in a moment, and then darting through the crowded shop, knavishly
escaped at the Piccadilly end. There was the Italian statuary shop, with
Canova’s Graces, the crouching Venus, and the birds round a vase in
alabaster; and, above all, there was Mrs. Lipscombe’s shop—I don’t mean
the staymaker’s, but the one next to that, the filter shop, with the
astonishing machines for converting foul and muddy water, like gruel,
thick and slab, into a sparkling, crystal stream. What a miracle it
seemed to me that the goblet, filled to the brim, and yet into which,
from the filter above, drops continually fell, never overflowed! How I
used to watch the little cork ball, kept in a continually bounding state
of agitation by the perpendicular jet of water—watch it with almost
breathless agitation, when, every now and then, the centre of gravity
would be lost, and the little ball would tumble in the basin beneath—the
whole was covered by a glass shade—till, caught up once more, it would be
sent in eddying whirls higher than ever! I have seen the same experiment
tried since with bigger balls—and of marble—very like twenty-four
pounders—at the _Grandes Eaux_ of Versailles, and in the gardens of
Peterhoff. Stone Neptunes and Tritons surrounded the basin, and the jets
of water, forty feet high, sent the spray flying in the faces of the
spectators; but none of these hydraulic displays ever came up, in my
opinion, to the tiny squirt, with the little cork ball, underneath the
glass shade, in Mrs. Lipscombe’s window. Does she make stays and sell
filters yet, I wonder! What a curious mixture of avocations! I know of
none stranger since the names of M. Fenwick de Porquet and Mrs. Mary
Wedlake were amalgamated, and inquiries as to whether we “bruised our
oats yet,” were alternated with pressing questions of “_Parlez vous
Français?_”
When I thus walked the Regent Quadrant, twenty years since, it was
haunted by a class of men, now, I am happy to believe, almost entirely
extinct. We have plenty of rogues in our body corporate yet. The turf
has its blacklegs and touts; the nightside of London is fruitful in
“macemen,” “mouchers,” and “go-alongs.” You must not be angry with me
for using slang terms; for did not a clergyman, at a highly-respectable
institution, deliver a lecture on slang the other day, and did not the
“Times” quote him? We are not free from skittle-sharps, card-cheats,
“duffers,” and ring-droppers; nay, even at remote country race-courses,
you may find remnants of the whilom swarming tribe of “charley-pitchers,”
the knavish gentry who pursue the games of “under seven or over seven,”
“red, black, leather and star,” or inveigle the unwary with “three little
thimbles and one small pea.” But a stern and righteous legislation has
put down nine-tenths of the infamous dens where any fool who chose
to knock was fleeced to the last lock of wool. If a man wants to be
vicious (in the gambling way) now, he must have the _entrée_ to the
abodes of vice, and a nodding acquaintance with the demon. A neophyte
is not allowed to ruin himself how and where he likes. In the days
of which I make mention, Regent Street and its purlieus abounded in
open gambling houses, and to the skirts of these necessarily hung on
a deboshed regiment of rogues, who made their miserable livings as
runners, and decoy-ducks, and bravos to these abominable nests. They
were called “Greeks,” and two o’clock in the afternoon was their great
time for turning out. From what infected holes or pestiferous garrets in
Sherrard, or Brewer, or Rupert Street, they came, I know not; but there
they were at the appointed hour, skulking with a half sheepish, half
defiant stride up and down Regent Street. Miserable dogs mostly, for
all their fine clothes—always resplendently, though dirtily, attired.
They wore great white coats, shiny hats, and mosaic jewellery, which was
just then coming into fashion. There was another fashion, in which they
very nearly succeeded, by adopting, to drive out, and make permanently
disreputable: that of wearing moustaches. They used to swagger about, all
lacquered, pomatumed, bejewelled, and begrimed, till I knew them all by
sight and many of them by name and repute. There was Jack Cheetham, the
lord’s son, he who was thrown out of the window at Frascati’s, and killed
the Frenchman in the Bois de Vincennes. There was Captain Dollamore,
who married the rich widow, and was arrested for her milliner’s bill
the week afterwards. There was Charley Skewball; he was called Charley,
but he was a baronet, had once been a gentleman, and was the greatest
rogue unhung. Mr. Thackeray knows these men well. They are his Count
Punters, Major Loders, M. de Caramboles, Hon. Algernon Deuceaces; but
they are extinct among us as a class, O Titmarsh; and simple people, who
read your admirable novels, wonder whom the monsters are that you draw.
They are dead; they are at the hulks; they are feebly punting at the few
remaining gambling places on the Rhine: they flaunted in the bad prime
of their manhood when I was a child. I have outgrown them; and only now
and then, when I am out very late, collecting materials for “Twice Round
the Clock,” I come upon a stray Jack or Charley—ragged and drivelling,
his fine feathers all moulted or smirched, his occupation quite gone—who
sidles up to me and calls me “Your honour,” and with salt-rheumy lips,
whimpers forth a supplication for “A penny towards a night’s lodging.”
When our dear Queen Victoria was crowned, I began to lose sight of Regent
Street—lost sight of it by degrees altogether, and came not back to it,
as an observer, for many years. I rather avoided the place, for I had a
bitter baptism of physical misery in the beginning of my working life:
wanting food and raiment, not through prodigality (that came afterwards),
but through sheer penury and friendlessness. And Regent Street, for all
my querulous childhood, was associated with too many memories of happier
days gone for ever. You know what the Italian rhymester says—
“Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella Miseria.”
An Englishman has stolen the thought in some lines about “a sorrow’s
crown of sorrow,” whose summing up I forget; but the sense of the passage
is that the times are exceedingly hard, when, destitute and footsore, you
pass by a house, and glance at the windows once lighted up by feasting
in which you participated; when you think of the rooms, once swept by
the robe of the woman whom you loved, but that now, house, windows,
rooms, are the portion of strangers. I say I went away from Regent
Street, and came not back. There were reasons. I became of the Strand
and Fleet Street a denizen, and Temple Bar entered into my soul. For I
was affiliated to a great mystery of Masonry, called Literature, and had
to follow the behests of my mother lodge. You don’t see much of Regent
Street, during your apprenticeship, if you begin at the lowermost degree,
I can assure you. Now I am a master-mason, free and accepted, and can
hold my own; albeit I shall never be an Office-bearer, or “Grand,” of my
lodge, or rise to the superlatives of the Royal Arch or the Thirty-third.
Behold Regent Street at two p.m., in the accompanying cartoon. Not
without reason do I declare it the most fashionable street in the world.
I call it not so for the aristocratic mansions it might possess; for
the lower parts of the houses are occupied as shops, and the furnished
apartments are let, either to music or operatic celebrities or to
unostentatious old bachelors. But the shops themselves are innately
fashionable. There was a dash of utilitarianism mingled with the slightly
Bohemian tinge of my Regent Street of twenty years ago; there were
bakers’ shops, stationers, and opticians, who had models of steam engines
in their windows. There was a grocer not above selling orange marmalade,
brown sugar, and Durham mustard. I remember buying a penny cake of
chocolate of him one morning; but I find the shop now expanded into a
magnificent emporium, where are sold wines, and spirits, sweetmeats
and preserves, liqueurs and condiments, Bayonne ham, Narbonne honey,
Bologna sausages, Russian caviare, Iceland moss, clotted cream, and
_terrines_ of _pâté de foie gras_. Indeed, Regent Street is an avenue
of superfluities—a great trunk-road in Vanity Fair. Fancy watchmakers,
haberdashers, and photographers; fancy stationers, fancy hosiers, and
fancy staymakers; music shops, shawl shops, jewellers, French glove
shops, perfumery, and point lace shops, confectioners and milliners:
creamily, these are the merchants whose wares are exhibited in this
Bezesteen of the world.
[Illustration: TWO O’CLOCK P.M.: HIGH CHANGE.]
Now, whatever can her ladyship, who has been shopping in Regent Street,
have ordered the stalwart footman, who shut the carriage door with a
resounding bang, to instruct the coachman to drive her to the Bank for?
Her ladyship’s own private bank is in a shiningly aristocratic street,
by Cavendish Square, embosomed among green trees. She does not want to
buy ribbons or lace on Ludgate Hill, artificial flowers in St. Paul’s
Churchyard, or fine linen in Cheapside. No; she has a very simple reason
for going into the city: Sir John, her liege lord, is on ’Change. He will
be there from half-past two to three, at which hour High ’Change, as it
may be called, closes, and she intends to call for him, and drive him to
the West-end again. By your leave, we will jump up behind the carriage,
heedless of the stalwart footman; for we are in the receipt of fern-seed,
and invisible.
Going on ’Change seems to be but a mechanical and mercantile occupation,
and one that might with safety be entrusted to some confidential clerk;
yet it is not so; and the greatest magnates of commerce and finance,
the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Huths, the legions of London’s
merchant-princes, are to be found chaffering in the quadrangle every
day. In the old Exchange, they used to point out the particular column
against which the elder Rothschild was wont to lean. They called the old
man, too—marvellous diplomatist in financial combinations as he was—the
Pillar of the Exchange. You know that the colonnades—whose ceilings are
painted in such elaborate encaustic, and with such a signal result in
ruin from damp and smoke—are divided into different promenades, variously
designated, according to the nations of the merchants who frequent them.
Thus—there are the Italian Walk, the Spanish Walk, the Portuguese Walk,
the Danish Walk, and—a very notable walk it is too—the Greek Walk.
Here you may see, jabbering and gesticulating, the crafty, keen-eyed,
sallow-faced Smyrnians, Suliotes, Zantrites, and Fanariotes, individuals
much given to speculations in corn, in which, if report does them no
injustice, they gamble most egregiously.
Three o’clock strikes—or rather chimes—from the bell-tower of Mr. Tite’s
new building. The quadrangle of the Exchange is converted into an
accurate model of the Tower of Babel. The mass of black-hatted heads—with
here and there a white one, like a fleck of foam on the crest of a
wave—eddies with violence to and fro. Men shout, and push, and struggle,
and jostle, and shriek bargains into one another’s ears. A stranger might
imagine that these money and merchandise dealers had fallen out, and were
about to fight; but the beadle of the Exchange looks on calmly; he knows
that no breach of the peace will be committed, and that the merchants and
financiers are merely singing their ordinary pæan of praise to the great
god Mammon. Surely—if there be not high treason in the thought—they ought
to pull down Mr. Lough’s statue of Queen Victoria, which stands in the
centre of the quadrangle, and replace it by a neat effigy of the Golden
Calf.
THREE P.M.—DEBENHAM AND STORR’S AUCTION-ROOMS, AND THE PANTHEON BAZAAR.
The travelled reader has visited that astonishing _atelier_ of mosaics
and _pietra dura_ in Florence maintained at the charges of the late
Grand Duke of Tuscany, (he has been signally kicked off thronedom, since
the first writing of these presents), and has watched with admiring
amazement the patient ingenuity with which the artisans adjust the tiny
little vitreous and metallic fragments, that, firmly imbedded in paste,
make the fruits and flowers, the birds and angels of the mosaic. What
an impossible task it is, apparently, to form the microscopic bits into
comely shapeliness, symmetrical in form and glowing with rich colours!
yet how deftly the artists accomplish their task! how the work grows
beneath their nimble hands! What astonishing memories these _maître_
mosaicists must have, remembering to a pin’s point where the high lights
on the petals of a rose will fall, and storing up in their minds archives
of the eyelashes of the Madonna, precedents for every scintillation of
the rays in the golden nimbus round His head! The mosaicists of Rome, and
Florence, and Venice—though the glorious art has well-nigh died out in
the Adriatic city—are the real administrative reformers, after all. The
right thing in the right place is their unvarying motto, and they are
never found putting the round men in the square holes, or _vice versâ_.
I have been led into this train of thought by the contemplation of the
exigencies of “Twice Round the Clock.” Time, my slave for once, though
he has been my stern and cruel master for years and years, and at whom I
mean to throw a dart when this series shall be completed—Time, who is my
bond servant, to fetch and carry, to hew wood and draw water for yet a
span, has culled from the wild garden of Eternity, and thrown at my feet,
a heterogeneous mass of hours, minutes, and seconds, and has said with a
mocking subserviency—“There, my master, there are the hours of the day
and night, and their minutest subdivisions; try and paste them on your
printed calendar; try and reconcile your men and women to them; try and
apportion in its proper measure of time each grain of sand to the futile
rivings and strivings of your conceited humanity. You have stumbled on
from hour to hour since the sun was young, telling, with indifferent
success, the good and bad deeds that are done in London as the relentless
needle pushes round and round the dial. Here, then, is Three o’Clock
in the Afternoon. Take it; see what you can make of it, and much good
may it do you!” And as Time, or the vagrant thought I have embodied for
the nonce, says this, he sticks his tongue into his cheek, as though he
thought that three o’clock in the afternoon were rather a poser to me.
Old man with the scythe and hour-glass, I defy thee! I will admit that
three o’clock post meridian, requires much deliberation and cogitation,
in order to give the millions of human marionettes, of whom I hold,
temporarily, the strings, their suitable employment; but it is rather
from a profusion than a paucity of scenes and things germane to the
hour that I am embarrassed. At three, ’Change is still going on, though
its busy time, the acmè of its excitement, is over. As the clock
strikes four, the city of London is in full pant; the clerks rush up
Cheapside, and dive down the wealthy narrow lanes, their bursting
bill-books (secured by leather-covered chains tied round their bodies)
charged with “three months after date, please pay to the order,”
which they cram into letter-boxes for acceptance. The private banking
houses in Lombard Street are in an orderly uproar of finance. The
rattling of shovels is incessant; office-boys cast thousands of pounds,
in notes, bills, and money, to the cashier, carelessly, across the
counter, paying vast sums in to their masters’ accounts; and the mighty
partners—in checked neckerchiefs, buff waistcoats, and creaking boots:
tremendous bank-partners, who are baronets, and members of Parliament,
lords even—stalk back from ’Change, pay a farewell visit to the bank
parlour, have a short but solemn confab with confidential subordinates,
relative to coming transactions at the clearing-house, and then enter
their carriages, and are borne to clubs, to the House of Commons, to
Greenwich dinners, or, perchance, if they have a dinner-party at home,
to their magnificent villas at Putney and Roehampton. What a colony
of bankers dwell there! the _sommités_ of the _haute finance_ seem to
entertain as decided a partiality for the banks of the Thames, as the
stockbrokers do for Brixton and Tulse Hill. Rare lives these money
keepers lead—scattering in the West that which they gather in the East.
Graperies, pineries, conservatories, ice-houses, dinner-parties, balls,
picnics; all these do they enjoy: they, their comely wives and handsome
daughters. They marry into the aristocracy! they have countesses and
marchionesses in their list of partners. It is not so many centuries
ago since the bankers were humble sellers of gold plate, dwelling in
Lombard Street and the Chepe, and following the great courtiers round the
quadrangle of the Exchange, intreating their lordships’ honours to be
allowed to keep their cash. Worthy individuals, however, are the majority
of these bankers, and it is but very rarely indeed that they make ducks
and drakes of their customers’ moneys. They are not so very proud either,
for all their splendid carriages and horses; and here, upon my word, is
Baron Lionel de Rothschild tearing up Ludgate Hill in a common Hansom
cab; but he, like the bad man whom Martial in an epigram declares not to
be so much vicious as vice itself, is less a Banker than a Bank.