"Oh, the Hangel, sir! Four shillings."
"No, no. I mean what distance."
"Well, say three, then, sir."
"But I mean--what distance? How many miles?"
"O, come, sir, jump in--don't be 'ard on a fellow--I 'aven't 'ad a fare
to-day. Call it 'arf a crown, sir."
Leigh Hunt says somewhere that if there were such a thing as
metamorphosis, Dr. Johnson would desire to be transformed into an
omnibus, that he might go rolling along the streets whose very pavements
were the objects of his ardent affection. And he was about right. What
better place is there in this world to study human nature than an
omnibus? All classes meet there; in the same coach you may see them
all--from the poor workwoman to the genteelly dressed lady, who looks as
if she disapproved of such conveyances, but must ride nevertheless--from
the young sprig, who is constantly anxious lest some profane foot should
dim the polish of his boots, to the urbane old gentleman, who regrets
his corpulence, and would take less room if he could. And then the top
of the omnibus, which usually carries four or more passengers, what a
place is that to see the tide of life which flows unceasingly through
the streets of London! I know of nothing which can furnish more food for
thought than a ride on an omnibus from Brompton to the Bank on a fine
day. It is a pageant, in which all the wealth, pomp, power, and
prosperity of this world pass before you; and for a moral to the
whirling scene, you must go to the nearest churchyard.
London is ever the same. The omnibuses follow each other as rapidly as
ever up and down the Strand, the white-gloved, respectable-looking
policemen walk about as deliberately, and the tail of the lion over the
gate of Northumberland House sticks out as straight as ever. The only
great change visible here is in the newspapers. The tone of society is
so different from what it was formerly, in all that concerns France,
that the editors must experience considerable trouble in accustoming
themselves to the new state of things. Once, France and Louis Napoleon
furnished Punch with his chief materials for satire and amusement, and
if any of the larger and more dignified journals wished to let off a
little ill humour, or to say any thing particularly bitter, they only
had to dip their pens in _Gaul_; but times are changed, and now nothing
can be said too strong in favour of "our chivalric allies, the French."
The memory of St. Helena seems to have given place to what they call
here the _entente cordiale_, which those who are acquainted with the
French language assure me means an agreement by which one party
contracts to "play second fiddle" to another, through fear that if he
does not he will not be permitted to play at all.
To the man who thoroughly appreciates the Essays of Elia, and Boswell's
Life of Johnson, London can never grow tiresome. He can never turn a
corner without finding "something new, something to please, and
something to instruct." Its very pavements are classical. And there is
nothing to abate, nor detract from, such a man's enthusiasm. The
traveller who visits the Roman Forum, or the Palace of the Caesars,
experiences a sad check when he finds his progress impeded by unpoetical
obstacles. But in London, all is harmonious; he sees on every side, not
only that which tells of present life and prosperity, but the perennial
glories of England's former days. Would he study history, he goes to the
Tower, "rich with the spoils of time"; or to Whitehall, where mad
fanaticism consummated its treasonable work with the murder of a
sovereign; or to the towering minster, to gaze upon the chair in which
the monarchs of a thousand years have sat; or to view the monuments, and
read the epitaphs, of that host of
"Bards, heroes, sages, side by side,
Who darkened nations when they died."
Is he a lover of English literature? Here are scenes eloquent of that
goodly company of wits and worthies, whose glowing pages have been the
delight of his youth and the consolation of his riper years; here are
the streets in which they walked, the taverns in which they feasted, the
churches where they prayed, the tombs where they repose.
And London wears well. To revisit it when age has sobered down the
enthusiasm of youth, is not like seeing a theatre by daylight; but you
think almost that you have under-estimated your privileges. How well I
remember the night when I first arrived in the metropolis! It was after
ten o'clock, and I was much fatigued; but before I booked myself in my
hotel, or looked at my room, I rushed out into the Strand, "with
breathless speed, like a soul in chase." I pushed along, now turning to
look at Temple Bar, now pausing to take breath as I went up Ludgate
Hill. I saw St. Paul's and its dome before me, and I was satisfied. No,
I was not satisfied; for when I returned up Fleet Street, I looked out
dear old Bolt Court, and entered its Johnsonian precincts with an awe
and veneration which a devout Mussulman, taking the early train for
Mecca, would gladly imitate. And then I posted down Inner Temple Lane,
and looked at the house in which Charles Lamb and his companions held
their "Wednesday nights"; and, going still farther, I saw the river--I
stood on the bank of the Thames, and I was satisfied. I looked, and all
the associations of English history and literature which are connected
with it filled my mind--but just as I was getting into a fine frenzy
about it, a watchman hove in sight, and the old clock chimed out eleven.
So I started on, and soon reached my hotel. I was accosted on my way
thither by a young and gayly dressed lady, whom I did not remember ever
to have seen before, but who expressed her satisfaction at meeting me,
in the most cordial terms. I told her that I thought that it must be a
mistake, and she responded with a laugh which very much shocked an
elderly gentleman who was passing, who looked as if he might have been
got up for the part of the uncle of the unhappy G. Barnwell. I have
since learned that such mistakes and personal misapprehensions very
frequently occur in London in the evening.
Speaking of Temple Bar, it gratifies me to see that this venerable
gateway still stands, "unshaken, unseduced, unterrified," by any of the
recent attempts to effect its removal. The old battered and splashed
doors are perhaps more unsightly than before; but the statues look down
with the same benignity upon the crowd of cabs and omnibuses, and the
never-ending tide of humanity which flows beneath them, as they did upon
the Rake's Progress, so many years ago. The sacrilegious commissioners
of streets long to get at it with their crows and picks, but the shade
of Dr. Johnson watches over the barrier of his earthly home. It is not
an ornamental affair, to be sure, and it would be difficult for Mr.
Choate, even, to defend it against the charge of being an obstruction;
but its associations with the literature and history of the last two or
three centuries ought to entitle its dingy arches to a certain degree of
reverence, even in our progressive and irreverent age. The world would
be a loser by the demolition of this ancient landmark, and London, if it
should lose this, though it might still be the metropolis of the British
empire, would cease to be the London of Johnson and Goldsmith, of
Addison and Pope, of Swift and Hogarth.
Perhaps some may think, from what I have said in the commencement of
this letter, that my enthusiasm has blinded me to those great moral and
social evils which are apparent in English civilization; but it is not
so. I love England rather for what she has been than for what she is; I
love the England of Alfred and St. Edward; and when I contrast the
present state with what it might have been under a succession of such
rulers, I cannot but grieve. Truly the court of St. James under Victoria
is not what it was under Charles II., nor even under Mr. Thackeray's
favourite hero, "the great George IV.,"--but are not St. James and St.
Giles farther apart than ever before? Is not Lazarus looked upon as a
nuisance, which legislation ought, for decency's sake, to put out of the
way? What does England do for the poor? Nothing; absolutely nothing, if
you except a system of workhouses, compared with which prisons are
delightful residences, and which seems to have been intended more for
the punishment of poverty than as a work of charity. No; on the
contrary, she discountenances works of charity; when a few earnest men
among the clergy of her divided church make an effort in that direction,
there is an outcry, and they must be put down; and their bishops, whose
annual incomes are larger than the whole treasury of Alfred, admonish
them to beware how they thus imitate the superstitions of the middle
ages. No; your Englishman of the present day has something better to do
than to look after the beggar at his doorstep; he is too respectable a
man for that; he pays his "poor rates," and the police must order the
thing of shreds and patches to "move on"; his progress must not be
impeded, for his presence is required at a meeting of the friends of
Poland, or of Italy, or of a society for the abolition of American
slavery, and he has no time to waste on such common, every-day matters
as the improvement of the miserable wretches who work his coal mines, or
of those quarters of the town where vice parades its deformity with
exulting pride, and the air is heavy with pestilence. There is
proportionably more beggary in London at this hour than in any
continental city. And such beggary! Not the comfortable, jolly-looking
beggars you may see in Rome or Naples, who know that charity is enjoined
upon the people as a religious duty, but the thin, pallid, high-cheeked
supplicants, whose look is a petition which tells a more effective story
than words can frame of destitution and starvation.
But there is another phase of this part of London life, sadder by far
than that of mere poverty. It is an evil which no attempt is made to
prevent, and so great an evil that its very mention is forbidden by the
spirit of this age of "superficial morality and skin-deep propriety." I
pity the man who can walk through Regent Street or the Strand in the
evening, unsaddened by what he shall see on every side. How ridiculous
do our boasts of this Christian nineteenth century seem there! Here is
this mighty Anglo-Saxon race, which can build steam engines, and
telegraphs, and clipper ships, which tunnels mountains, and exerts an
almost incredible mastery over the forces of nature,--and yet, when
Magdalene looks up to it for a merciful hand to lift her from
degradation and sin, she finds it either deaf or powerless. There is a
work yet to be done in London which would stagger a philanthropist, if
he were gifted with thrice the heroism, and patience, and
self-forgetfulness of a St. Vincent of Paul.
I cannot resist the inclination to give in this connection a passage
from the personal experience of a friend in London, which, had I read it
in any book or newspaper, I should have hesitated to believe. One
evening, as he was passing along Pall Mall, he was addressed by a young
woman, who, when she saw that he was going to pass on and take no notice
of her, ran before him, and said in a tone of the most pathetic
earnestness,--
"Well, if you'll not go with me, for God's sake, sir, give me a trifle
to buy bread!"
Thus appealed to, and somewhat shaken by the voice and manner, he
stopped under a gaslight, and looked at the speaker. Vice had not
impressed its distinctive seal so strongly upon her as upon most of the
unfortunate creatures one meets in London's streets; indeed, there was a
shade of melancholy on her face which harmonized well with her voice and
manner. So my friend resolved to have a few words more with her, and
buttoning up his coat, to protect his watch and purse, he told her that
he feared she wanted money to buy gin rather than bread. She assured him
that it was not so, but that she wished to buy food for her little
child, a girl of two or three years. Then he asked how she could lead
such a life, if she had a child growing up, upon whom her example would
have such an influence; and she said that she would gladly take up with
an honest occupation, if she could find one,--indeed, she did try to
earn enough for the daily wants of herself and child with her needle,
but it was impossible,--and her only choice was between starvation and
the street. At that time she said that she was learning the trade of a
dressmaker, and she hoped that before long she should be able to keep
herself above absolute necessity. Encouraged by a kind word from my
friend, she went on in a simple, womanly manner, and told him of her
whole career. It was the old story of plighted troth, betrayed
affection, and flight from her village home, to escape the shame and
reproach she would there be visited with. She arrived in London without
money, without friends, without employment,--without any thing save that
natural womanly self-respect which had received such a severe
blow:--necessity stared her in the face, and she sank before it. My
friend was impressed by the recital of her misfortunes, and thinking
that she must be sincere, he took a sovereign from his purse and gave it
to her. She looked from the gift to the giver, and thanked him again and
again. He continued his walk, but had not gone more than three or four
rods, when she came running after him, and reiterated her expressions of
thankfulness with a trembling voice. He then walked on, and crossed over
to the front of the Church of St. Martin, (that glorious soldier who
with his sword divided his cloak with the beggar,) when she came after
him yet again, and seizing hold of his hand, she looked up at him with
streaming eyes, and said, holding the sovereign in her hand,--
"God bless you, sir, again and again for your kindness to me! Pray
pardon me, sir, for troubling you so much--but--but--perhaps you meant
to give me a shilling, sir,--perhaps you don't know that you gave me a
sovereign."
How many models of propriety and respectability in every rank of
life,--how many persons who have the technical language of religion
constantly on their lips,--how many of those who, nurtured amid the
influences of a good home, have never really known what temptation
is,--how many such persons are there who might learn a startling lesson
from this fallen woman, whom they seem to consider themselves
religiously bound to despise and neglect! I have a great dread of these
severely virtuous people, who are so superior to all human frailty that
they cannot afford a kind word to those who have not the good fortune to
be impeccable. But we all of us, I fear, need to be reminded of Burns's
lines--
"What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted."
If we thought of this, keeping our own weaknesses in view, which of us
would not shrink from judging uncharitably, or casting the first stone
at an erring fellow-creature? Which of us would dare to condemn the poor
girl who preserved so much of the spirit of honesty in her degradation,
and to commend the negative virtues which make up so many of what the
world calls good lives?