labyrinth of avenues between triple-laden stalls, all crowded with ladies
and children, whose voluminous _jupons_—the very babes and sucklings
wear crinoline now—render locomotion inconvenient, not to say perilous.
Pass the refreshment counter, where they sell the arrowroot cakes,
which I never saw anywhere else, and let us enter the conservatory—a
winter garden built long ere Crystal Palaces or Jardins d’Hiver were
dreamt of, and which to me is as pleasant a lounge as any that exists
in London: a murmuring fountain, spangled with gold and silver fish,
and the usual number of “winking bubbles beading at the brim;” and good
store of beautiful exotic plants and myriad-hued flowers. The place is
but a niche, a narrow passage, with a glass roof and a circle at the end,
where the fountain is, like the bulb of a thermometer; but to me it is
very delightful. It is good to see fair young faces, fair young forms,
in rainbow, rustling garments, flitting in and about the plants and
flowers, the fountain and the gold fish. It is good to reflect how much
happiness and innocence there must be among these pretty creatures. The
world for them is yet a place for flirting, and shopping, and dancing,
and making themselves as fair to view as they and the looking-glass and
the milliner can manage. The world is as yet a delightful Pantheon,
full of flowers—real, wax, and artificial, and all pleasant—sandal-wood
fans, petticoats with worked edges, silk stockings, satin shoes, white
kid gloves, varnished broughams, pet dogs, vanille ices, boxes at the
opera, tickets for the Crystal Palace, tortoise-shell card-cases,
enamelled visiting-cards, and scented pink invitation notes, with “_On
dansera_” in the left-hand bottom corners, muslin slips, bandoline,
perfumes, ballads and polkas with chromo-lithographed frontispieces,
and the dear delightful new novels from Mudie’s with uncut leaves, and
mother-o’-pearl paper knives with coral spring handles to cut them
withal. They have kind mammas and indulgent port-wine papas, who bring
them home such nice things from the city. They sit under such darling
clergymen, with curls in the centre of their dear white foreheads; they
have soft beds, succulent dinners, and softly-pacing hacks, on which to
ride in coquettish-looking habits and cavalier hats. John the footman
is always anxious to run errands for them; and their additional male
acquaintance is composed of charming creatures with white neckcloths,
patent leather boots, irreproachable whiskers, and mellow tenor voices.
Oh! the delightful world; sure, it is the _meilleur des mondes possible_,
as Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss maintained. It is true that they were at
school once, and suffered all the tyranny of the “calisthenic exercises”
and the French mark, or were, at home, mewed up under the supervision
of a stern governess, who set them excruciating tasks; but, oh! that
was such a long time since, they were so young then—it was ever such a
long time ago. You silly little creatures! it was only the day before
yesterday, and the day after to-morrow——. But “gather ye rosebuds while
ye may,” and regard not old Time as he is a-flying. For my part, I will
mingle no drop of cynicism in the jewelled cup of your young enjoyment;
and I hope that the day after to-morrow, with unkind husbands and
ungrateful children, with physic-bottles and aches and pains, and debts
and duns, may never come to you, and that your pretty shadows may never
be less.
You see that I am in an unusual state of mansuetude, and feel for the
nonce inclined to say, “Bless everybody”—the Pope, the Pretender, the
Pantheon, the pretty girls, and the sailors’ pig-tails, though they’re
now cut off. Every sufferer from moral _podagra_ has such fits of
benevolence between the twinges of his gout. But the fit, alas! is
evanescent; and I have not been ten minutes in the conservatory of
the Pantheon before I begin to grumble again. I really must shut my
ears in self-defence against the atrocious, the intolerable screeching
of the parrots, the parroquettes, the cockatoos, and the macaws, who
are permitted to hang on by their wicked claws and the skin of their
malicious beaks to the perches round the fountain. The twittering of the
smaller birds is irritating enough to the nervously afflicted; but the
parrots! ugh! that piercing, long-continued, hoarse shriek—it is like a
signal of insane communication given by a patient at Hanwell to a brother
lunatic at Colney Hatch. The worst of these abominable birds is, that
they cannot or will not talk, and confine themselves to an inarticulate
gabble. However, I suppose the fairest rose must have its thorns, and the
milkiest white hind its patch of darker colour; so it is incumbent on us,
in all charity, to condone the ornithological nuisance which is the main
drawback to a very pretty and cheerful place of resort. Only, I should
like to know the people who buy the parrots, in order that I might avoid
them.
As we entered by Oxford Street, with its embeadled colonnade, it becomes
our bounden duty to quit the building by means of that portal which I
assumed to have been in days gone-by the stage-door of the pig-tail
opera-house, and which gives egress into Great Marlborough Street. I
can’t stand the parrots; so, leaving my aunt (I wish she would lend me
a hundred pounds), and my cousin (I wish she would lend me a kiss, and
more sincerely do I wish that either of them existed in the flesh, or
elsewhere but in my turbid imagination); leaving these shadowy relatives
genteelly bargaining (they have already purchased a _papier maché_
inkstand and a coral wafer-stamp), I slip through the conservatory’s
crystal precincts, inhale a farewell gust of flower-breeze, pass through
a waiting-room, where some tired ladies are resting till their carriages
draw up, and am genteelly bowed out by affable beadle No. 2.
And now, whither away? Shall I cross the road, and commence the first
of a series of six lessons in dancing from Miss Leonora Geary? Shall I
visit the harp and pianoforte establishment of Messrs. Erard, and try
the tone of an “upright grand?” Shall I hie me to Marlborough Street
police-court, and see how Mr. Bingham or Mr. Hardwick may be getting
on? No: I think I will take a walk down Regent Street (one cannot too
frequently perambulate that delightful thoroughfare at the height of the
season), turn off by Vigo Lane, and take a stroll—a five minutes’ stroll,
mind, for I have an appointment close to St. George’s Hospital, and Mr.
Decimus Burton’s triumphal arch, as soon after four as possible—down the
Burlington Arcade.
I remember once refecting myself at a public dinner—the Tenth Anniversary
Festival of the Hospital for Elephantiasis, I think it was—when my next
neighbour to the right (to the left was a rural dean) was a gentleman in
a white waistcoat that loomed large like the lateen sail of a Palermian
felucca, and whose convivial countenance was of the exact hue and texture
of the inside of an over-ripe fig. He took remarkably good care of
himself during dinner time, had twice spring soup, and twice salmon and
cucumber, led the waiters a terrible life, and gathered quite a little
grove of bottles of choice wine round him. I am bound to say that he
was not selfish or solitary in his enjoyment, for he pressed a peculiar
Sautern upon me, and an especial Chateau Lafitte (the landlord must have
known and respected him), with a silver label hanging to its bottle
neck, like the badge of a Hansom cabman. He also recommended gosling to
me, as being the very thing to take after lamb, in a rich husky voice,
that did one good to hear. At the conclusion of the repast, after we
had dabbled with the rosewater in the silver-gilt shield, which it is
the custom to send round, and which nobody knows exactly what to do
with—I always feel inclined to upset it, for the purpose of eliciting an
expression of public feeling, and clearing the atmosphere generally; and
when the business of the evening, as the absurd system of indiscriminate
toast-giving is termed, had commenced, and the professional ladies and
gentlemen were singing something about the “brave and bearded barley” in
execrable time and tune, of course in the most preposterously irrelevant
connection with the health just drank—either the Army and Navy, or the
two Houses of Parliament—my neighbour with the ripe fig countenance
turned to me, and wiping his moist lips with his _serviette_, whispered
these remarkable words: “Sir, a public dinner is the sublimation of an
assemblage of superfluities.” He said no more during the evening, filled
up his name, however, for a handsome amount in the subscription-list (his
name was announced amid thunders of applause by the secretary, but I
really forget whether he was a general or a wholesale grocer), and went
away in anything but a superfluous state of sobriety. But his words sank
deep into my mind, and they bring me at once to the Burlington Arcade.
Which is to me another sublimate of superfluities: a booth transplanted
bodily from Vanity Fair. I don’t think there is a shop in its _enceinte_
where they sell anything that we could not do without. Boots and
shoes are sold there, to be sure, but what boots and shoes? varnished
and embroidered and be-ribboned figments, fitter for a fancy ball or
a lady’s chamber, there to caper to the jingling melody of a lute,
than for serious pedestrianism. Paintings and lithographs for gilded
boudoirs, collars for puppy dogs, and silver-mounted whips for spaniels,
pocket handkerchiefs, in which an islet of cambric is surrounded by
an ocean of lace, embroidered garters and braces, fillagree flounces,
firework-looking bonnets, scent bottles, sword-knots, brocaded sashes,
worked dressing-gowns, inlaid snuff-boxes, and falbalas of all
descriptions; these form the stock-in-trade of the merchants who have
here their tiny _boutiques_. There are hair-dressers’ shops too; but I
will be bound that their proprietors would not be content with trimming
a too luxuriant head of hair. They would insist upon curling, oiling,
scenting, and generally tittivating you. They would want you to buy
amandine for your hands, kalydor for your hair, dentifrice, odonto,
_vinaigre de toilette_, hair-brushes with ivory backs, and tortoiseshell
pocket-combs with mirrors appended to them. They would insist that you
could not live without _pommade Hongroise_ and _fixatures_ for the
moustaches, or Frangipani for the pocket-handkerchief. I have very
few ambitions, but one is to become the proprietor of a house in the
Burlington Arcade, and forthwith to open a chandler’s shop in the very
midst of its vanities and its whim-whams. The reproof, I trust, would
be as stern, though I am afraid it would have as little effect, as that
of the uncompromising patriots of the reign of terror, who planted the
parterres of the Tuileries gardens with potatoes. To the end of time, I
perpend, we shall have this hankering after superfluities, and little
princesses will ask their governesses why the people need starve for want
of bread, when there are such nice Bath buns in the confectioners’ shop
windows.
But the clock of St. James’s warns me that I am due at Hyde Park Corner,
and passing by yet another beadle, I emerge into Piccadilly.
FOUR P.M.—TATTERSALL’S, AND THE PARK.
Was there not a time when Hyde Park Corner was the Ultima Thule of
London, and Kensington was in the country?—when Hammersmith was far
away—a district known only to washerwomen and nursery gardeners—and
Turnham Green and Kew were places where citizens took their wives to
enjoy the perfection of ruralisation? Was it not to the Hercules’ Pillars
at Hyde Park Corner that Squire Western sent his chaplain to recover the
snuff-box, which the worthy landed-gentleman and justice of the peace had
left there when he halted to bait? Was not Hyde Park Corner a rendezvous
for highwaymen, where they listened with eagerness for “the sound of
coaches;” and parted, some towards Fulham, some towards Hounslow, some
towards the Uxbridge road, where they might meet full-pouched travellers,
and bid them “stand and deliver?” I remember, myself, old Padlock House
at Knightsbride, standing in the midst of the roadway, like Middle Row
in Holborn, or the southern block of Holywell Street in the Strand,
with the padlock itself fixed in the grimy wall, which, according to the
legendary wishes of a mythical testator, was never to be pulled down till
the lock rotted away from its chain, and the chain from the brick and
mortar in which it was imbedded. The cavalry barracks at Knightsbride
seemed to have been built in the year One, and we boys whispered that
the little iron knobs on the wall of the line of stables, which are, it
is to be presumed, intended for purposes of ventilation (though I am
not at all certain about the matter yet) were miniature portholes, at
which fierce troopers, with carbines loaded to the muzzle, and ready
pointed, kept guard every day, in order to repel the attacks of the
“Radicals.” Alack-a-day! but the “Radicals” seem to be getting somewhat
the better of it at this present time of writing. Kensington High Street
seemed to belong to a hamlet of immense age; the old church was a very
cathedral—built, of course, by William of Wykeham; and as for Holland
House, there could not be any doubt about that. It came in naturally with
the Conqueror, and the first Lord Holland.
Hyde Park Corner before the battle of Waterloo must have been a strange,
old-fashioned-looking place. No Apsley House: the site was occupied
by the old woman who kept the apple-stall, or the bun-house, or the
curds and whey shop, and who wouldn’t be bought out, save at enormous
prices, by his late Grace, Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington. No
triumphal arch; and, thank good taste, no equestrian statue of the late
F. M. Arthur Dux, &c., on the summit thereof. No entablatured colonnade,
with nothing to support, towards the Park. No Achilles statue. A mean,
unpicturesque, common-place spot, I take it. What could you expect of
an epoch in which the Life Guards wore cocked hats and pig-tails, the
police-officers red waistcoats and top boots, when the king _de jure_
was mad, and the king _de facto_ wore a wig and padded himself? A bad
time. We have a lady on the throne now who behaves as a sovereign should
behave, and London grows handsomer every day.
I declare that it does; and I don’t care a fig for the cynics—most of
them ignorant cynics, too—who, because they have accomplished a cheap
tour to Paris, or have gone half-way up the Rhine, think themselves
qualified to under-rate and to decry the finest metropolis in the world.
I grant the smoke—in the city—and I confess that the Thames is anything
but odoriferous in sultry weather, and is neither so blue nor so clear as
the Neva; but I say that London has dozens and scores of splendid streets
and mansions, such as I defy Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or St. Petersburg—I
know their architectural glories by heart—to produce. I say that Pall
Mall beats the Grand Canal at Venice; that Regent Street, with a little
more altitude in its buildings, would put the Boulevard des Italiens to
shame; and that Cannon Street makes the Nevskoi Perspective hide its
diminished head. Some of these days, when I can get that balance at the
banker’s I have been waiting for so long, I shall sit down and indite a
book entitled, “A Defence of London, Architecturally Considered,” the
which I shall publish at my own expense, as I am certain no publisher
would purchase the copyright.
Take Hyde Park Corner. Between the Brandenburg Thor at Berlin and the
Puerta del Sol at Madrid, you will not find a gayer, more picturesque,
more sparkling scene. Ugly and preposterous as is the man in the cocked
hat, who holds the rolling-pin and is wrapped in the counterpane, on
the top of the arch, we are not for ever giving ourselves wry necks
in the attempt to look up at him; and the arch itself is noble and
grandiose. Then, opposite, through the _a giorno_ of Mr. “Anastasius”
Hope’s colonnade, that supports nothing, you catch a glimpse of the leafy
glories of Hyde Park—carriages, horses, horsewomen, Achilles’ statue,
and all. And again, to the right of the arch, is St. George’s Hospital,
looking more like a gentleman’s mansion than an abode of pain; and to
the left the ever-beautiful, ever-fresh, and ever-charming Green Park.
And then far away east stretches the hill of Piccadilly, a dry Rialto
(only watch it at night, and see the magical effects of its double line
of gas-lamps); and westward the new city that the Londoners have built
after their city was finished, beyond the Ultima Thule. Magnificent lines
of stately mansions, towering park gates, bring us to the two gigantic
many-storeyed edifices at Albert Gate, which were for a long time
christened “Gibraltar,” because they were supposed to be impregnable,
no tenant having been found rich or bold enough to “take them.” Taken
they both were at last, however. The further one, or at least its lower
portion, has been for a considerable period occupied by a banking
company; while the near one—ah! that near Gibraltar, has had two strange
tenants—the representatives of two strange fortunes. There dwelt the
Railway King, a gross, common, mean man, who could not spell very well,
Rumour said: but to him—being king of iron roads and stuffed with shares
even to repletion, such shares being gold in those days, not dross—came
the nobles of the land, humbling themselves on their gartered knees, and
pressing the earth with their coroneted brows, and calling him King of
Men, that he might give them shares, which he gave them. So this gross
man was “hail fellow well met” with the nobles, and was drunk at their
feasts and they at his, and he sat in the Parliament House, and made laws
for us; and when he sent out cards of invitation, the wives and daughters
of the nobles rose gladly in the night season, and having painted their
faces and bared their necks, and put tresses of dead men’s hair on their
heads, they drove in swift chariots to Albert Gate, and all went merry as
a marriage bell.
“But, hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”
It was indeed the great knell of universal railway smashdom, the St.
Sepulchre’s boom of found-out humbug. So down went the Railway King, and
down into the kennel toppled the iron crown—not so much of Lombardy, this
time, as of those Lombards whose arms are three golden spheres. An iron
crown to moralise over, that; and of which, as of a red-hot halfpenny,
the motto reads appositely—“_Guai a chi la tocca_,” “Woe be to him who
touches it.”
Albert Gate, the near house, yet saw lighted rooms, and great revelry
and feasting, and a brave tenant; no other than Master Fialin Persigny,
Ambassador of France. Courtly, witty, _rusé_ Persigny Fialin! the nobles
and princes were as glad to come to his merry-makings as in the old time,
when the now broken-down Railway Stag held high court there. Crafty
Fialin! he must have rubbed his hands sometimes, with a sly chuckle, as,
from the upper chambers of his splendid house, he tried to descry, far
off at Kensington, a now waste spot where once stood GORE HOUSE. And, oh!
he must have sung—“What a very fine thing it is to be Ambassador-in-law
to a very magnificent three-tailed Bashaw of an Emperor, and to live at
Albert Gate.” Not so many years since, though, master and man were glad
to take tea at Gore House, with the beautiful Woman who wrote books,
and the handsome Count who painted portraits; when the Bashaw’s bills
were somewhat a drug in the discount market, and his ambassador did not
precisely know how to make both ends meet. All of which proves that the
world is full of changes, and that fortune is capricious, and that master
and man have made an uncommonly good thing of it.
Don’t be afraid of a sudden raid on my part towards the lands that lie
beyond Brentford. My present business lies close to Hyde Park Corner,
close to St. George’s Hospital. We have but to turn down Lower Grosvenor
Place, and lo and behold, we are at our destination—TATTERSALL’S.
I suppose the British Empire could not progress prosperously without
Tattersall’s; so, I suppose, we must cry Tattersall’s and the
Constitution! Tattersall’s and our Ancient Institutions! Tattersall’s
and Liberty! And, indeed, of the last there seems in reality to be much
liberty, and equality, and fraternity in all connected with horse-racing;
and at Tattersall’s, though the resort of the most patrician turfites,
the democratic element is appreciably strong. So long as both parties
pay their bets, dukes and dustmen, Jews and jockeys, seem to meet
upon a cheerful footing of “man to man” at this peculiarly national
establishment.
The astute prophets who vaticinate in the Sunday newspapers, and who
never can, by the remotest chance of possibility, be wrong in their
calculations, are in the habit of speaking of the sporting transactions
at Tattersall’s as “Doings at the Corner.” I think it would be slightly
more appropriate if they were to characterise them as “Doings at the
Corners,” for of corners, and a multiplicity of them, Tattersall’s seems
made up. It is easy enough to distinguish the whereabouts of the great
temple of horse-racing, for from Hyde Park Corner far down Grosvenor
Place, you will find at FOUR O’CLOCK (business has been going on
throughout the afternoon), a serried line of vehicles, with the horses’
heads towards Pimlico. Equipages there are here of every description and
grade. Lordly mail phætons, the mettlesome steeds impatiently champing
at the bit, and shaking their varnished, silver-mounted, crest-decorated
harness; slim, trim, dainty gentlemen’s cabriolets (I am sorry to see
that those most elegant of private vehicles are becoming, year after
year, fewer in number), with high wheels and tall gray horses, and
diminutive, topbooted tigers, squaring their little arms over the
aprons; open carriages and pairs, with parasolled ladies within (for
even rank and beauty do not disdain to wait at Tattersall’s while my
Lord or Sir John goes inside to bet, and perhaps also to put something
on the favourite for Lady Clementina or the Honourable Agnes); gigs and
dog-carts, sly little broughams with rose-coloured blinds and terriers
peeping from beneath them, and whose demure horses look as though they
could tell a good many queer stories if they chose; taxed carts, chaise
carts, and plain carts, that are carts and nothing else. I should not be
at all surprised indeed to see, some fine afternoon, a costermonger’s
“shallow,” donkey, greenstuff-baskets and all, drawn up before
Tattersall’s, while its red ’kerchiefed, corduroyed, and ankle-jacked
proprietor stepped down the yard to inquire after the state of the odds.
There is, you may be sure, a plentiful sprinkling of Hansom cabs among
the wheeled things drawn up. The Piccadilly cabmen are exceedingly
partial to fares whose destination is Tattersall’s. Such fares are always
pressed for time, and always liberal; and they say that there are few
Jehus on the stand between the White Horse Cellar and Hyde Park Corner
who do not stand to win or lose large sums by every important racing
event.