indices of an ebb at no very remote period, so far as the city is
concerned, that same business is at the West-end in its extremest
activity. The shops of the West Strand, Piccadilly, Oxford and Regent
Streets, are thronged with customers, chiefly ladies; the roadway
is encumbered with carts and carriages; and street avocations—the
minor commerce of the mighty mart—are in full swing. Thick-necked and
beetle-browed individuals, by courtesy called dog-fanciers, but who
in many cases might with as much propriety answer to the name of
dog-stealers—forbidding-looking gentry, in coats of velveteen, with large
mother-o’-pearl buttons, and waistcoats of the neat and unpretending
moleskin—lurk about the kerbs of the purlieus of Regent Street and
Waterloo Place (the police drive them away from the main thoroughfares),
with the little “dawgs” they have to sell tucked beneath their arms, made
doubly attractive by much washing with scented soap, and the further
decoration of their necks with pink or blue ribbons. Here is the little
snub-nosed King Charles—I hope the _retroussé_ appearance of his nasal
organ is not due to the unkind agency of a noose of whipcord—his feathery
feet and tail, and his long silky ears, sweeping the clean summer
pavement. Here is the Newfoundland pup, with his bullet head and clubbed
caudal-appendage, winking his stupid little eyes, and needing, seemingly,
an enormous amount of licking into shape. Here is the bull-dog, in his
full growth, with his legs bowed, his tail inclining to the spiral, his
broad chest, thin flanks, defined ribs, moist nozzle, hare lip, bloodshot
eyes, protruding fang, and symmetrical patch over one eye; or else, in
a state of puppyhood, peeping from his proprietor’s side-pocket, all
pink and white like a morose sucking-pig become a hermit. Here is the
delightful little toy English terrier, with his jet-black coat, erect
neck, and tan paws; and here the genuine Skye, gray or brown, like an
unravelled ball of worsted. See, too, grimacing at all who come to view,
like a mulatto at a slave auction, who fancies himself good-looking, the
accomplished French poodle, with his peaked nose, woolly wig, leggings,
and tail band, and his horrible shaved, salmon-coloured body. He can
dance; he can perform gun-drill; he can fall motionless, as though dead,
at the word of command; he can climb up a lamp-post, jump over a stick,
hop on one leg, carry a basket in his mouth, and run away when he is
told that a policeman is coming. You can teach him to do anything but
love you. These, and good store of mongrels and half-breeds that the
dealer would fain palm upon us as dogs of blood and price, frisk and
fawn about his cord-trouser covered legs; but where is the toy-dog _par
excellence_, the playful, snappish, fractious, facetious, charming,
utterly useless little dog, that, a quarter of a century since, was the
treasure of our dowagers and our old maids? Where is the Dutch pug? Where
is that Narcissus of canine Calibanism, with his coffee-coloured coat,
his tail in a ring like the blue-nosed baboon’s, his crisped morsels of
ears, his black muzzle, his sharp, gleaming little teeth, his intensely
red lips and tongue? Is he extinct, like the lion-dog from Malta, the
property of her Majesty the Queen, and the “last of his race,” whom
courtly Sir Edwin Landseer drew? Are there no more Dutch pugs? They must
exist somewhere. Cunning dealers owning _recherché_ kennels in the New
Road or at Battle Bridge, or attending recondite “show clubs,” held at
mysterious hostelries in the vicinity of Clerkenwell, must yet have some
undoubted specimens of the pug for sale. There must be burghers yet, in
the fat comfortable houses at Loo by the Hague, or in the plethoric,
oozy vicinage of Amsterdam—there must be Tietjens, and Tenbroecks,
and van Ramms, and van Bummels, whose pride it is, amidst their store
of tulip bulbs, china vases, cabinet pictures by Breughel and Ostade,
lacquer-work from Japan, and spice-boxes from Java, to possess Dutch
pugs in the flesh. But the creature is seen no more in London streets,
and we must be content with him on Hogarth’s canvases, in Linacre’s
engravings, or modelled in china, as we see him in the curiosity shops.
I have indeed seen the elephant—I mean the Dutch pug—alive and snarling,
once in my life. He was led by a bright scarlet ribbon—scarlet, mind,
not pink or blue—attached to his silver collar; and there must have
been something in the appearance of my youthful legs (I was but five,
and they were bare, plump, and mottled) that excited his carnivorous
propensities, for, long as is the lapse of time, I remember that he
rushed at me like a coffee-coloured tiger. His mistress was a Duchess,
the grandest, handsomest Duchess that had ever lived (of course, I except
Georgina of Devonshire) since the days of that Grace of Queensberry
of whom Mr. Thackeray was good enough to tell us in the “Virginians.”
She, my Duchess, wore a hat and feathers, diamonds, and a _moustache_—a
downy nimbus round her mouth, like that which Mr. Philip insinuates
rather than paints in his delightful Spanish girls’ faces. I see her
now, parading the cliff at Brighton, with her black velvet train—yes,
madam, her train—held up by a page. She was the last duchess who drove
down to Brighton in a coach and six. She was the last duchess who at
Twelfth-night parties had a diamond ring baked in the cake which was to
be distributed by lots. Before she came to her coronet, she had been a
singing woman at a playhouse, had married a very foolish rich old banker,
and, at his death, remarried a more foolish and very poor duke. But she
was an excellent woman, and the relative to whom she left the bulk of her
wealth, is one of the most charitable, as I am also afraid she is one of
the most _ennuyée_, ladies in England. I am proud of my reminiscence. It
is not every one that has seen a Dutch pug and the Duchess of St. Albans
alive.
Body of me! here am I wasting my time among the dog-fanciers—(when
the name of the man in the iron mask, the authorship of “Junius,” the
murderer of Caspar Hauser, and the date of the laws of Menu, shall be
known, it shall also be patent to all men why trafficking in dogs and
horses seem necessarily connected with roguery)—here am I descanting
on poodles and pug-dogs, when, with quick observant eyes, I should be
noting the hundred little trades that are being driven at three o’clock
in the afternoon. The feverish industry—the untiring perseverance—the
bitter struggle, and all for yon scanty morsel of bread, and a few
inches of space for repose at night in a fourpenny lodging-house! Follow
the kerb-stone from the County Fire Office to St. Martin’s Lane. See
the itinerant venders of catch-’em-alive-o’s, of cheap toys, of quires
of writing-paper, sealing-wax and envelopes, all for the small charge
of one penny; see the industrials who have walking-sticks, umbrellas,
gutta-percha whips, aërated balls, locomotive engines and statuettes
of Napoleon in glass phials, that make us wonder, as with flies in
amber, however they, the engines and statuettes, got there; the women
who have bouquets to dispose of—how many times have they been refreshed
beneath the pump, this droughty day?—the boys and girls in looped and
windowed raggedness striving to sell fruit, flowers, almanacks, pencils,
fusees—anything, to keep the wolf from the door. He is always at the
door, that wolf—always at that yawning portal, and his name is Famine.
The worst of the brute is, that he comes not alone—that he has a friend,
a brother wolf with him, who hankers round the corner, and is always
ready to pop in at the door at the slightest suspicion of a summons.
This wolf is a full-paunched rogue, and liberal, too, of succulent, but
_poisoned_ food to his friends. This is the thief wolf, the gallows wolf,
the Calcraft wolf. _Lupus carnifex_. He keeps up an incessant whining
baying, which, being interpreted, means, “Work no more. See how hard the
life is. What’s the good of working? Come and Steal.” Look here, my lords
and gentlemen—look here, my right honourable friends—look here, my noble
captains—look here, your honours’ worships—come out of your carriages,
come out of your clubs, come out of your shooting-boxes in the Highlands,
and your _petites maisons_ in the Regent’s Park, and look at these faded
and patched creatures. I tell you that they have to rise early and go to
bed late—that they have to work hours and hours before they can turn one
penny. They have never been taught; they are seldom fed, and more seldom
washed; but _they don’t steal_. I declare that it is a wonder they do
not—a marvel and a miracle they do not. They remain steadfastly honest;
for, in the troubled sea of their lives, Almighty Mercy has planted a
Pharos, or light-house. The night is pitchy black oft enough; the light
revolves—is for a time invisible—and the poor forlorn, tempest-torn
man watches the blank horizon in all but mute despair; but the blessed
gladdening gleam comes round again, as we have all seen it many a time on
the ocean, and, sighing, the honest man resolutely keeps on his course.
Following the kerb-stone myself from the before-mentioned County Fire
Office to St. Martin’s Lane, and passing through Leicester Square—which,
what with the Alhambra “Palace” and its hideous American posters, the
Great Globe, and the monster _cafés chantants_, I begin to be rather
uncertain about recognising—passing, not without some inward trembling,
the stick shop at the corner of the lane, while on either side of the
portal those peculiarly ugly carved clubs—the very Gog and Magog of
walking-stickery—keep watch and ward, I cut dexterously through the
living torrent that is flowing from Charing Cross toward St. Giles’s
(they were villages once, Charynge and Saint Gyles’s—ha! ha!) and
commence the ascent of New Street, a feat well nigh as disagreeable, if
not as perilous, as that of Mont Blanc. I hate this incorrigible little
thoroughfare; this New Street. It is full of bad smells, mangy little
shops, obstructions, and bad characters. There is a yawning gin-palace at
its south-western extremity. The odours of its eating-houses—especially
of a seedy little French _pension bourgeoise_ about half way up—are
displeasing to my nostrils. The cigars vended in New Street are the
worst in London, and the sweetstuff shops are mobbed—yes, mobbed—by
children in torn pinafores who _never_ have any pocket handkerchiefs.
Of late days, photographers have hung out their signs and set up their
lenses in New Street; and if, passing through the street, you escape
being run over by a wagon or upset by an inebriated market-gardener, you
run great risks of being forcibly dragged into the hole tenanted by a
photographic “artist,” and “focussed,” willy nilly. Thoroughfares, almost
inconceivably tortuous, crapulous, and infamous, debouch upon New Street.
There is that Rose Street, or Rose Alley, where, if I be not wrong in my
topography, John Dryden, the poet, was waylaid and cudgelled; and there
is a wretched little haunt called Bedfordbury, a devious, slimy little
reptile of a place, whose tumble-down tenements and reeking courts spume
forth plumps of animated rags, such as can be equalled in no London
thoroughfare save Church Lane, St. Giles’s. I don’t think there are five
windows in Bedfordbury with a whole pain of glass in them. Rags and
filthy _loques_ are hung from poles, like banners from the outward walls.
There is an insolent burgher of Bedfordbury, who says I owe him certain
stivers. Confound the place! its rags, its children, its red herrings,
and tobacco-pipes crossed in the windows, its boulders of whitening, and
its turpentine-infected bundles of firewood!
The pursuit of New Street, thus maledicted, brings me to King Street,
Covent Garden, a broad, fair, well-conducted public way, against which I
have no particular prejudice; for it leads up to Covent Garden Market,
which I love; and it contains within its limits the Garrick Club.
Before, however, you come to the Garrick, before you come to the
coffee-shop where there is that strange collection of alarming-looking
portraits; before you come to Mr. Kilpack’s cigar divan and
bowling-alley, you arrive at the door of an unpretending, though roomy
mansion, the jambs of whose portals are furnished with flattering
catalogues relative to “this day’s sale,” and the pavement before whose
frontage is strewn with fragments of straw and shreds of carpeting. It is
strange, too, if you do not see half a dozen or so burly-looking porters
lounging about the premises, and a corresponding number of porter’s
knots, the straw stuffing bulging occasionally from rents in their
sides, decorating the railings, as the pint pots do the iron barriers of
the licensed victuallers. This mansion contains the great auction-room
of Messrs. Debenham and Storr. Let us enter without fear. There is
scarcely, I think, so interesting an exhibition in London; yet, in
contradistinction to the majority of London exhibitions, there is nothing
to pay.
In this monstrous amalgam of microcosms, London, a man may, if he
will only take the trouble, find that certain places, streets, rooms,
peculiar spots and set apart localities, are haunted by classes of people
as peculiar as the localities they affect, and who are seldom to be
found anywhere else. In the early forenoon, long before business hours
commence, the benches of the piazza of the Royal Exchange have their
peculiar occupants—lank, mystic-looking men, mostly advanced in years,
and shiny in threadbare blackclothdom. They converse with one another
seldom, and when they do so, it is but in furtive whispers, the cavernous
mouth screened by the rugose hand, with its knotted cordage of veins and
its chalkstoned knuckles, as though the whisper were of such commercial
moment that the locutor feared its instantaneous transport to the ears
of Rothschild or Baring, and the consequent uprising or downfalling
of stocks or corn, silk or tallow. Who are these men, these Exchange
ghosts, who haunt the site of Sir Thomas Gresham’s old “Burse?” Are they
commission agents come to decay, bankrupt metal brokers, burnt-out,
uninsured wharfingers, lame ducks of the Stock Exchange, forced even
to “waddle” from the purlieus of Capel Court? There they sit day after
day—their feet (lamentably covered with boots of fastidious bigness, for,
alas! the soles are warped, the sides crack, the heels are irrevocably
lopsided) beating the devil’s tattoo on the stone pavement, their big
cotton umbrellas distilling a mouldy moisture, or a pair of faded Berlin
gloves, quite gone and ruined at the fingers, lying on the bench beside
them. Their battered hats oscillate on their heads through overloading
with tape-tied papers, and oft-times, from the breast-pocket of their
tightly-buttoned coats, they drag leathern pocketbooks, white and frayed
at the edges like the seams of their own poor garments, from which
pocketbooks they draw greasy documents, faded envelopes, sleezy letters,
which have been folded and refolded so often that they seem in imminent
danger of dropping to pieces like an over-used passport at the next
display. With what an owl-like, an oracular, look of wisdom they consult
these papers! What are they all about? The bankruptcy of their owners
thirty years ago, and the infamous behaviour of the official assignees
(dead and buried years since)? their early love correspondence? their
title-deeds to the estates in Ayrshire, and the large pasture lands in
the Isle of Skye? Who knows? But you never see these ghostly time-waiters
anywhere but on ’Change, and out of ’Change hours. Directly the
legitimate business of that place of commercial re-union commences, they
melt away imperceptibly, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father at cock-crow,
coming like shadows and so departing.
The dreadful night dens and low revelling houses of past midnight London,
the only remnants left among us of the innumerable “finishes” and
saloons and night-cellars of a former age, have also their peculiar male
population, stamped indelibly with the mint-mark of the place, and not to
be found out of it, save in the dock of the adjacent police-court. Where
these _ruffiani_, these copper captains and cozening buz-gloaks, are to
be found during the day, or even up to midnight—for in the gallery even
of any decent theatre they would not be admitted—must remain a secret;
perhaps, like the ghoules and afrits, the bats and dragons of fable,
they haunt ruinous tombs, deserted sepulchres, church-yards sealed up
long since by the Board of Health; but so soon as two or three o’clock
in the morning arrives, they are to be found wherever there are fools to
be fleeced or knaves to plot with. You study their lank hair and stained
splendid stocks, their rumpled jay’s finery and rascal talk, their cheap
canes and sham rings; but they, too, fade away with the dawn—how, no
man can say, for the meanest cabman would scorn to convey them in his
vehicle—and are not beheld any more till vagabondising time begins again.
“Supers,” too—or theatrical supernumeraries, to give them their full
title—are a decidedly distinctive and peculiar race; and though reported,
and ordinarily believed, to exercise certain trades and handicrafts in
the daytime, such as shoemaking, tailoring, bookbinding, and the like,
my private belief is that no “super” could exist long in any atmosphere
remote from behind the scenes or the vicinity of the stage-door of a
theatre. Look, too, at the audience of a police court: look at the
pinched men who persist in attending the sittings of the Insolvent
Debtors’ Court in Portugal Street, or hang about the dingy tavern
opposite, and who consume with furtive bites Abernethy biscuits and
saveloys, half hidden in the folds of blue cotton pocket-handkerchiefs.
Yes, the proverb reads aright—as many men, so many minds; and each man’s
mind, his idiosyncrasy, leads him to frequent a certain place till he
becomes habituated to it, and cannot separate himself therefrom. There
are your men who delight in witnessing surgical operations, and those
who never miss going to a hanging. There is a class of people who have
a morbid predilection for attending coroners’ inquests, and another
who insist upon going to the Derby, be the weather wet or dry, cold or
hot, though they scarcely know a horse’s fore from his hind legs, and
have never a sixpenny bet on the field. There is a class who hang about
artists’ studios, knowing no more of painting than Mr. Wakley does of
poetry; there are the men you meet at charity dinners, the women you meet
at marriages and christenings. Again, there is a class of eccentrics,
who, like the crazy Earl of Portsmouth, have an invincible _penchant_ for
funerals—“black jobs,” as the mad lord used to call them; and finally,
there are the people who haunt SALES BY AUCTION.
[Illustration: THREE O’CLOCK P.M.: DEBENHAM AND STORR’S AUCTION-ROOMS.]
Walk into Debenham and Storr’s long room, and with the exercise of a
little judgment and keenness of observation, you will be enabled to
recognise these amateurs of auctions in a very short space of time, and
to preserve them in your memory. They very rarely bid, they yet more
rarely have anything knocked down to them; indeed, to all appearances,
the world does not seem to have used them well enough to allow them to
buy many superfluities, yet there they stand patiently, hour after hour,
catalogue in hand—they are always possessed of catalogues—ticking off the
amount of the bids, against the numbers of the articles which they never
buy; you should remark, too, and admire, the shrewd, knowing, anxious
scrutiny which they extend to the articles which are hung up round the
room, or which are held up for inspection by the porter, as the sale
proceeds. They seem actually interested in the cut of a Macintosh, in the
slides of a telescope, in the triggers of a double-barrelled gun; they
are the first to arrive at, the last to leave the Sale; and then, in the
close of the afternoon, they retire, with long-lingering footsteps, as
though—like the gentleman for whom a judge of the land and twelve honest
men had settled that a little hanging was about the best thing that could
be done, and who so often fitted the halter, took leave, and traversed
the cart—they were “loath to depart,” which I am willing to believe
they are. I imagine to myself, sometimes, that these men are cynical
philosophers, who delight in the contemplation of the mutabilities of
property; who smile grimly—within their own cynical selves—and hug
themselves at the thought, not only that flesh is grass, that sceptre and
crown must tumble down, and kings eat humble pie, but that the richest
and the rarest gems and gew-gaws, the costliest garments, the bravest
panoplies, must come at last to the auctioneer’s hammer.
Perhaps you would like to know what they are selling by auction at
Debenham and Storr’s this sultry July afternoon. I should very much
like to know what they are not selling. Stay, to be just, I do not hear
any landed estates or advowsons disposed of: you must go to the Auction
Mart in Bartholomew Lane if you wish to be present at such Simoniacal
ceremonies; and, furthermore, horses, as you know, are in general sold
at Tattersall’s, and carriages at Aldridge’s repository in St. Martin’s
Lane. There are even auctioneers, I am told, in the neighbourhood of
Wapping and Ratcliffe Highway, who bring lions and tigers, elephants and
ourangoutangs, to the hammer; and, finally, I must acquit the respectable
firm, whose thronged sale-room I have edged myself into, of selling by
auction such trifling matters as human flesh and blood.
But from a chest of drawers to a box of dominoes, from a fur coat to a
silver-mounted horsewhip, from a carpenter’s plane to a case of lancets,
from a coil of rope to a silk neck-tie, from a dragoon’s helmet to a
lady’s thimble, there seems scarcely an article of furniture or wearing
apparel, of use or superfluity, that is not to be found here. Glance
behind that counter running down the room, and somewhat similar to the
narrow platform in a French _douane_, where the luggage is deposited to
be searched. The porters move about among a heterogeneous assemblage of
conflicting articles of merchandise; the clerk who holds aloft the gun
or the clock, or the sheaf of umbrellas, or whatever other article is
purchased, hands it to the purchaser, when it is knocked down to him,
with a confidential wink, if he knows and trusts that customer, with a
brief reminder of “money” and an out-stretched palm, signifying that a
deposit in cash must be forthwith paid in case such customer be not known
to him, or, what will sometimes happen, better known than trusted. And
high above all is the auctioneer in his pulpit, with his poised hammer,
the Jupiter Tonans of the sale.
And such a sale! Before I have been in the room a quarter of an hour, I
witness the knocking down of at least twenty dress coats, and as many
waistcoats and pairs of trousers, several dozen shirts, a box of silk
handkerchiefs, two ditto of gloves, a roll of best Saxony broadcloth,
a piece of Genoa velvet, six satin dresses, twelve boxes of artificial
flowers, a couple of opera glasses, a set of ivory chessmen, eighteen
pairs of patent leather boots—not made up—several complete sets of
carpenters’ tools, nine church services, richly bound, a carved oak
cabinet, a French bedstead, a pair of china vases, a set of harness,
three boxes of water colours, eight pairs of stays, a telescope,
a box of cigars, an enamel miniature of Napoleon, a theodolite, a
bronze candelabrum, a pocket compass, twenty-four double-barrelled
fowling-pieces (I quote _verbatim_ and _seriatim_ from the catalogue),
a parrot cage, three dozen knives and forks, two plated toast-racks, a
Turkey carpet, a fishing-rod, winch, and eelspear, by Cheek, a tent by
Benjamin Edgington, two dozen sheepskin coats, warranted from the Crimea,
a silver-mounted dressing-case, one of eau-de-Cologne, an uncut copy of
Macaulay’s “History of England,” a cornet-à-piston, a buhl inkstand, an
eight-day clock, two pairs of silver grape-scissors, a poonah-painted
screen, a papier-maché work-box, an assortment of variegated floss-silk,
seven German flutes, an ivory casket, two girandoles for wax candles, an
ebony fan, five flat-irons, and an accordion.
There! I am fairly out of breath. The mere perusal of the catalogue
is sufficient to give one vertigo. But whence, you will ask, the
extraordinary incongruity of the articles sold? We know when a gentleman
“going abroad” or “relinquishing housekeeping,” and who is never—Oh dear,
no!—in any manner of pecuniary difficulty, honours Messrs. So-and-So with
instructions to sell his effects, what we may look forward to when the
carpets are hung from the windows with the sale-bills pinned thereon,
and the auctioneer establishes a temporary rostrum on the dining-room
table. We know that after the “elegant modern furniture” will come
the “choice collection of pictures, statuary, and _virtù_,” then the
“carefully-selected library of handsomely-bound books,” and then the
“judiciously assorted stock of first-class wines.” But what gentleman,
what tradesman, what collector of curiosities and odds and ends even,
could have brought together such an astounding jumble of conflicting
wares as are gathered round us to-day! The solution of the enigma
lies in a nutshell, and shall forthwith be made manifest to you. The
articles sold this afternoon are all _pawnbrokers’ pledges unredeemed_,
and this is one of Messrs. Debenham and Storr’s quarterly sales, which
the law hath given, and which the court awards. Your watch, which your
temporary pecuniary embarrassments may have led you to deposit with a
confiding relative thirteen months since, which your renewed pecuniary
embarrassments have precluded you from redeeming, and which your own
unpardonable carelessness has made you even forget to pay the interest
upon, may be among that angling bundle of time-pieces which the clerk
holds up, and on which the auctioneer is, at this very moment, descanting.
The eloquence of the quarterly sale does not by any means resemble the
flowery Demosthenic style first brought into fashion among auctioneers
by the distinguished George Robins. Here are no ponds to be magnified
by rhetoric into fairy lakes, no little hills to be amplified into
towering crags, no shaven lawns to be described as “boundless expanses
of verdure.” The auctioneer is calm, equable, concise, but firm, and the
sums realised by the sale of the articles are reasonable—so reasonable,
in fact, that they frequently barely cover loan and interest due to the
pawnbroker. But that is his risk; and such is the power of competition
in trade, that a London pawnbroker will often lend more upon an article
than it will sell for. In the provinces the brethren of the three golden
balls are more cautious; and in Dublin they are shamefully mean in
their advances to their impoverished clients; but it is in Paris _par
excellence_, that the great national pawning establishment, the Mont de
Piété, manifests the most decided intention, by the microscopic nature of
its loans, of taking care of itself.