We're a true Boeotian people after all: that's a fact. We may talk
about Attic art and Doric strength; but in our habits, no less than in
our climate, we certainly belong to the wrong side of the hills. We're a
stuffing and guzzling race, if ever there was one; we doat on great
hunks of meat and flagons of strong drink; and as truly as every Paddy
has got a hot potato somewhere in his head, making him the queer, mad
chap he is, so have we got a national brain compounded of pudding, and
beef, and sausages, turning us into that stubborn and stolid people
which we know ourselves to be. Sidney Smith expressed the fundamental
idea of the English nation to a T, when he said that the ultimate end of
all good government was a hot chop and plenty of claret; but, in saying
so, he did no more than re-echo the burden of the old song, translated
into more modern and fashionable language--
"Back and side go bare, go bare;
Both foot and hand go cold;
But belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old!"
Ah! he was a splendid fellow that indited this song, and so was that
other clerical wight who broached the idea--
"When I go to bed, then of heaven I dream;
But that is fat pullets and clotted cream;"--
A real Devonian or Somersettian parson; but they spoke from the
heart,--or rather from the stomach, jolly, good comfortable souls as
they were, and their words go right home to the stomachs and hearts of
all, wherever the British lion has the privilege of lashing his tail or
shaking his mane.
As to eating, _quoad comedendum constipandumque_, we keep up the
Boeotic charter to the very letter and spirit of all its provisions;
and in the moistening of our national clay, we certainly show a
praiseworthy diligence; we wet it like bricks--and that's a fact, too;
but as for doing these important matters in proper places and at proper
times, there, _selon nous_, we are lamentably behind-hand with the rest
of the unfledged, articulate-speaking, bipedal genus to which we have
the honour to belong. And as it has been lately shown in our pages, as
clear as the sun at noonday, (the truth of which beautiful and rare
simile, gentle reader, varies considerably with the place where you may
happen to use it--from Shoe Lane, London, to the Strada di Toledo at
Naples,) or as clear as--clear can be, that John Bull does not know how
to put a decent coat on his back when he goes out to dinner; so now it
is to be essayed to show, that for all he may think otherwise, John has
not got a comfortable, sensible house to go and eat his dinner in; that
he does not know what a regular, good, snug, and snoozy chimney-corner
is; and that, when he stumbles up-stairs to bed, he generally puts
himself into a hole, but not what can be called a room--a real
comfortable, respectable bed-room. We do not say that he might not have
done so once--we know, on the contrary, that he did; all we contend for
is, that he does not do so now, and we don't think he is in the right
way to mend; and, as John is a special friend of ours, and so is Mrs
Bull, and all the little Bulls, who will be big, full-grown Bulls some
day or other, and as we like to make ourselves useful to the present
generation, and hope to be agreeably remembered by posterity, therefore
do we intend to take the Bull by the horns, and see if we cannot
wheedle, coax, pull, push, or bully him into our way of thinking about
rooms and houses.
It is set down as a national axiom at the present day, that we are at
the very head of the world in arts, arms, manufactures, laws,
constitution, Church and State, literature, science--(any thing
else?--there must be something more; to be sure there is)--money and
railroads! and he's no true Englishman, Sir, he's not one of the
British public, if he does not think so. We see it in print every
day--it must be true; we've read as much in the _Times_, _Herald_,
_Chronicle_, _Post_, &c.--for the last twenty years, and what all the
world says must be so. Be it so, honest John, we honour your Boeotic
patriotism; it's a glorious principle, old boy, and 'twill carry you
bravely through all the thicks and thins of life--"sed audi alteram
partem"--do put your nose outside your own door a bit, now that
railroads are so plenty and cheap--do go abroad a little--just go and
look at some of those foreigners in their own outlandish countries, and
then think quietly over these matters again. Besides, who's afraid of
change now-a-days? Are we not making all these splendid inroads into the
country, ay, and into the constitution?--are we not going to have corn
and cattle, and silk and cotton, and butter and cheese, and brandy to
boot, all brought to our own doors for nothing? We'll leave these other
things alone--we will not argue about them now; let us talk about bricks
and mortar, and suchlike, and see if we cannot open your eyes to the
light of reason and common sense.
Now, what is the end, object, and use of all habitations, houses,
tenements, and premises whatsoever in this same united kingdom of our's,
and in this glorious nineteenth century, except to shelter a man from
the cold, or the heat, or the damp, or the frost, or the wind, whichever
may come upon him, or any part or parcel of the same; and further, to
give him room to hoard up, stow away, display, use, and enjoy all his
goods, chattels, and other appurtenances; and further, wherein to sit
down with a friend or friends, as the case may be, to any description of
meal that his purse can or cannot pay for, and then to give him room and
opportunity either to spatiate for the good of digestion, or to put his
India-silk handkerchief over his bald pate, and snore away till
tea-time? This being the very acme of comfort, the very object of all
labour, the only thing that makes life worth living for, in the opinion
of three-fourths of Queen Victoria's loving subjects, it follows, that
if they would spend that money they love so much in a rational and truly
economical way, they should bear such objects as these constantly in
sight. This brings us, therefore, to the enunciating, for the second
time, that great fundamental law of human operations--usefulness first,
ornament afterwards, or both together if you please; but not, as we see
the law interpreted now-a-days--ornament and show in the first place,
and usefulness and comfort put in the background. It is this backward
reading of the great rule of common sense, that makes men so uncommonly
senseless as we often find them to be; and when it comes in the way of
building, it turns us into the least architectural and worst built
nation of any in this part of Christendom. Taking into account the cost
of erecting buildings, and the relative value of money in different
countries, there are no towns in Europe where so little good building
and so small a degree of architectural effect are produced as in those
of "old England." Poets and home tourists have affected to fall into
rhapsodies of admiration at the beautiful neatness of our small country
towns, at the unparalleled magnificence of London, at the ostentatious
splendour of our commercial cities, Liverpool, Bristol, &c. This is all
very well for home readers, and for home reputation; for there is
nothing like a lot of people congregating themselves into a nation, and
then be-lauding themselves and their doings up to the skies--there is
nobody to say nay, and they can easily write themselves down the first
people on earth. The fault is not peculiar to England; that vapouring
coxcomb Crapaud is full of such nonsense; and that long-haired,
sallow-cheeked, quid-chewing Jonathan, is still more ridiculously fond
of indulging in it: but because it is one of the most offensive
weaknesses of human nature, it is not therefore the less worthy of
reprehension, and the sooner we try to throw off such false and morbid
patriotism the better. The three towns in Great Britain, which, taking
them in the general average of their common buildings, their citizens'
houses, can be called the best-looking ones, are these:--first and
fairest is dear Auld Reekie, next is Cheltenham, and last is Bath. The
great metropolis we put out of the comparison, for metropolitical cities
should be compared together; but Edinburgh is _facile princeps_ in the
list of all habitable places in this island; Cheltenham is at the head
of all watering-places, and pleasure-places--(Brighton, Leamington,
Clifton, &c., are certainly not equal to it in point of good
architecture and general effect;) and Bath, now that its fashionable
name has somewhat declined, may be looked on as the leader of our
second-rate quiet kind of towns. Were we to make a fourth class of
comparisons we would take our cathedral cities, and place Oxford at the
head, before Worcester, Exeter, and so forth. But we revert to our first
proposition; and were we about to show a foreigner those places
wherewith we could desire him to compare his own distant cities, we
should take him to the three above mentioned. It is in these three
places that the great essentials of use and ornament seem to us to be
the most happily combined; attempts are made at them in other quarters
with various degrees of success, but here their union has been the most
decided. Bear our opinion in mind, gentle reader; and, when next you go
upon your travels, see if what we assert be not correct.
The style of house we most object to is Johnson's--you don't know
Johnson? Why, don't you recollect the little bustling man that used to
live at the yellow house in the City-Road, and that you were sure to
meet every day, about eleven o'clock, in Threadneedle Street, or by the
Bank Buildings? Well, he has been so successful in the drug line that he
has left the City-Road, and has moved into the far west, Paragon Place,
Bryanstone Square; and, not content with this, has taken a house at
Brighton, on the Marine-Parade, for his "Sunday out," as he terms it. He
is a worthy fellow at bottom, but he has no more taste than the pump;
and while he thinks he inhabits the _ne plus ultra_ of all good houses,
lives in reality in ramshackle, rickety, ugly, and inconvenient dens.
The house in Paragon Place is built of brick, like all others; but the
parlour story is stuccoed to look like stone, the original brick tint
being resumed at the levels of the kitchen below and the drawing-room
above. There are two windows to the said drawing-room--one to the
dining-room; and so on in proportion for the four stories of which the
edifice consists: but the back is a curious medley of ins and outs, and
ups and downs; single windows to dark rooms, and a dirty little bit of a
back-yard, with a square plot of mud at the end of it, called "the
garden;" the cook says the "airey" is in front; and Johnson knows that
his wine-cellar is between the dust-bin and the coal-hole under the
street. If you knock at the door you are let in to a passage too wide
for one, but not wide enough for two, and you find at once the whole
penetralia of the habitation lying open to your vision; dining-room door
on right hand, parlour door behind it; kitchen door under the stairs,
and garden door at the end of the passage. You know the man's whole
household arrangements in a minute; and if he is not in the
drawing-room, (but Johnson never does sit there, his wife keeps it for
company,) it is of no use his pretending not to be at home, when you
have your hand within a few feet of the locks of each door on the
ground-story. And then, though the passage is dark, for there is only
the fan-light over the entrance, and the long round-headed window at the
first landing, all full of blue and orange glass, you know that dinner
is preparing; for you see the little mahogany slab turned up to serve as
a table near the parlour door, and such a smell comes up the kitchen
stairs, that were you at the cook's elbow you could not be more in the
thick of it. Well, they tell you he's in, and you walk up-stairs to the
drawing-room; one room in front and the best bed-room behind; and Mr and
Mrs Johnson's up-stairs again over the drawing-room; and the children's
room behind that--you can hear them plain enough; and above all, no
doubt, is the maid's room, and the servant-boy's who let you in; not so,
the boy sleeps in the kitchen, and the front attic is kept for one of
Johnson's clerks, for you might have seen him going up the second pair;
and if he wasn't going to his bed-room what business had he up-stairs at
all? So that, though you have been in the house only five minutes, you
know all about it as well as if Mortice the builder had lain the plans
on the table before you. Well, Johnson won a picture in the _Art-Union_
some time since, and determined to stick it up in the drawing-room,
against the wall fronting the windows; so up came the carpenter; and, as
the picture was large, away went a ten-penny nail into the wall; and so
it did go in, and not only in, but through the wall, for it was only
half a brick thick; and, what with repeated hammerings, the bricks
became so loose that the picture could not be safely hung there. So it
was ordered to be placed against the wall opposite the fireplace--the
wall of the next house in fact--and the same operation was going on,
when old Mrs Wheedle, the next door neighbour, sent in her compliments
to beg that Mr Johnson would have some regard for her hanging
bookshelves, the nails of which had been all loosened by his
battering-ram, and the books were threatening to fall on her tableful of
china--she called it "cheyney"--below. Again, on the other side lives,
or rather lodges, Signor Bramante, the celebrated violoncello, and he
practises in what he has made the back drawing-room, equivalent to
Johnson's best bed; but, the other day, when Smith came up from
Birmingham to see Johnson, he could get no sleep for the first half of
the night, Bramante having occasion to practise till nearly one o'clock,
for the _Stabat Mater_ of next morning's concert. So much for the
substantiality of Johnson's town-house. His rooms, too, to our mind, are
of bad proportions, and most inconveniently situated; they are so low
that it is impossible to ventilate them properly; he has always a flight
or two of stairs to go up when he retires to bed, and his servants might
as well live in a treadmill, for the quantity of step-treading that they
have to perform. There is no possibility of sitting in any one room out
of a draft from either door or window, and there is not a single good
cupboard in the whole house. As for ornament, there is none outside save
the brass-knocker on the street door, for the windows are plain oblong
holes in the walls; and, as for the inside, the only attempts at it are
the cheap and meagre stucco patterns of the cornices, and the somewhat
tawdry designs of the paper-hangings. He pays seventy pounds a-year rent
for it, however, and sets himself down as a lucky man, because with his
rates, &c., he comes within the hundred.
After all, when he goes to Brighton he is not much better off; though,
as he likes fresh air, he gets plenty of it there, through every window,
door, and chimney of the house--for there the bow-windowed projection in
front is made of wood, coated over with tiles, to look like bricks.
There he never attempted any picture-hanging fancies, the
partition-walls would stand no such liberties being taken with them;
there he cannot complain of not knowing what is going on in the town,
for he can hear all that is said in the next house, by merely putting
his ear to the wall. The most serious drawback, however, to his comfort
in his marine residence, is, that while there he can never have a
good-sized dinner-party, inasmuch as his landlord made it a stipulation
of the lease, that not more than twelve people should be allowed to meet
in the drawing-room at the same time, and that no dancing whatever
should be attempted within the dwelling. The Brighton man only built the
house for fifteen years; whereas the London one was more provident, he
guaranteed his for thirty.
Johnson's bed-rooms are, even the best of them, of moderate size, while
the small ones are very small indeed; and into these small rooms he has
stuck large four-post beds, that make them darker and more inconvenient
than they naturally are, and leave room for hardly any of the usual
evolutions of the toilette. What, indeed, with the big chests of
drawers, like the big sideboard in the dining-room, it is as much as you
can do to get about conveniently between the bed and the side walls;
though one good thing the builder and furnisher have certainly
effected--you can open the bed-room door, and you can stir the fire, and
you can almost pull up the window-blind, without quitting the protection
of the counterpane; and this on a cold morning is something.
Mrs Johnson says that the arrangement of the area gate in Paragon Place
is perfection itself; for she can see the butcher's boy as he comes for
his orders of a morning, while sitting at the breakfast-table, through
the green blinds, and that the policeman dares not stop there, during
daylight at least--she should be much too sharp upon him; so that the
cook is twice as punctual as when they lived in the city. True; these
are points of household management that have their weight; but then Mrs
J. forgets that the dustman rings his bell there at most inconvenient
hours, that the dirty coalheaver spoils the pavement once a month, and
that it is a perpetual running up and down those stone steps, to shut
the gate and keep dogs and beggars out, all day. However, the railings
and the gate are not part of the house; and, if people like to have
their back-doors under their eyes, why, there is no accounting for their
taste.
We could not help thinking, the last time we went over to Paris, that
our friend Dubois, the wine-merchant--him from whom we get our
Chambertin, and who has about the same relative income as Johnson--was
much better housed. His cellars are down at the Halle aux Vins, like
every body else's; and he is shut up there in his little box of a
counting-house nine hours every day of his life; but he lives, now that
he has moved from the Marais, in the Rue Neuve des Mathurins, which
leads out of the Chaussee d'Antin. Here he has a _premier_, as they call
it in Paris--or a first-floor, as we should term it in London; and he
pays 2000 francs, or L80 a-year for it, with about 100 francs of rates
and taxes. For this he has two drawing-rooms, a dining-room, a study,
six bed-rooms, kitchens, and cellars; some of the rooms look into the
street, the rest run round the ample court-yard of the house. To get at
him you go up a flight of stone stairs that four people can easily mount
abreast; when you enter his door, from the little hall paved with stone
and marble, you pass from the sitting-rooms one into the other--for they
all form a suite; while the bed-rooms lie mostly along a corridor, into
which they open. Once up the two flights of stairs that lead to the
doorway, and the mounting, whether for masters or servants, is done
with. The kitchen is at the furthest end, away from the other rooms, and
is approached by a back staircase from the court-yard. There are no
beggars nor dogs, nor butcher's boys, nor other bores, except what the
concierge at the gateway allows to come in; and though the street is
rather noisy, being in a fashionable quarter, yet the court-yard is
perfectly quiet, and free from all plagues of organs, singers, &c. The
rooms are, one and all, _twelve_ feet high; their Windows down to the
ground; the floors of solid oak, polished till you can slide on them;
the doors are in carved oak, painted white and richly gilt; the
chimney-pieces are all marble--none of the flimsy thin slabs of Paragon
Place, but good solid blocks, cut out from the red quarries of the
Pyrenees; with polished brass dogs in the fireplaces, and large logs of
flaming wood across then. The drawing-rooms are hung in silk on the
walls; the other rooms are tastefully papered. There is abundance of
good furniture, which, from the ample size of the apartments--the
principal room being thirty feet by twenty--sets off the proportions of
the dwelling without blocking it up. Dubois has not a four-post bed in
his house; no more has any man in France. They are all those elegant and
comfortable things which we know a French bed to be; and the long
sweeping folds of the red and white curtains that come down to the floor
from the ceiling, form a graceful contrast to the curves of the other
furniture. The walls are all of good solid stone, two feet thick on the
outside; the house has been built these fifty years, and is of a better
colour than when first put up; the windows are richly ornamented in
their frames without, and form commodious recesses for settees within.
You may dine twenty, and dance forty people here! or you may throw your
rooms open, give a soiree, (no boiled mutton affair, remember; but
music, dancing, and cards; coffee, ice, and champagne,) and cram each
room full of people, and the landlord will never fear for the safety of
his building.
Now, there are three other sets of apartments in the same house, and
above Dubois, not so lofty as his, but nearly as commodious, and all
with their proportionate degree of elegance and solid comfort. Dubois
has not got a house at Dieppe, it is true; but then, like all Frenchmen,
he is so absorbed in his dear Paris, that he hardly cares to stir out
from it. If ever he does, he runs off to Vichy or Mont Dor for a
fortnight in the _saison des eaux_, and he is contented.
But then, you will say, Dubois lives, after all, in another man's
house--he is only a lodger; whereas Johnson dwells in what the law calls
his "castle." Be it so; for the same money we would rather have the
positive advantages of the one, _en societe_, than the tasteless and
inconvenient isolation of the other.
And, after all, is Johnson more decidedly at home in his own house, than
Dubois is in his "_appartement_?" What does it matter whether you have
people living on each side of you, with their street doors so close to
yours that their wives or their daughters pop up their noses above the
green blinds every time a cab or a jarvey drives up; or whether you have
people who come in at the same gateway with yourself, and go up the same
stairs, it is true, and who live either above or below you, and who can,
if they like, run out on their landings to see who is thumping at your
door panels? Upon our conscience as honest folks, who have lived in half
the capitals of Europe, to say nothing of those of our own islands, we
never found the slightest intrusion on privacy arising from the
collecting of several families in the same house, in Paris, Rome,
Florence, or Vienna. All we know is, and we often think of it agreeably,
that these continental houses seemed to us like so many social colleges,
and that the having a set of rooms with a common staircase, used to put
us in mind of our old Christ Church, and of Garden Court in the Temple.
'Tis true, that in the one set of rooms we had no fellow-inmates except
our dog, and every now and then a joyous set of fellows that would have
made any place tolerable; that in the other there was our old laundress
and bed-maker, and our "boy," and for a short time our "man," and
actually, upon our honour it is true, we did once see a client in them!
whereas, in our continental suites of chambers, we are _en famille_ with
wife, bairns, and "bounes" to boot, and that we did _parfois_ try the
elasticity or the stretching powers of our _camere_ pretty considerably,
and did cram therein no end of guests. But on the whole, we have fairly
made the experiment _in propria persona_; we have weighed well friend
Johnson's castellated independence, and _l'ami_ Dubois's social
contiguation;--and, rent for rent, we prefer the latter. If we must live
with two neighbours within a few feet of us, we would rather have one
under us on the ground floor, and one above us on the second, and
ourselves in the midst on the first, and all three clubbing together to
live in a little palazzo:--we would rather have this, than be crammed in
between Mr A and Mr B, each of us in a third or fourth rate kind of
house, with poor thin walls, small low rooms, dirty areas, melancholy
gardens, shabby-genteel fronts, ugly backs, and little comfort.
It may be said, and justly, that the idea of a man living in his own
castle is applicable only to that state of society when large towns do
not exist, inasmuch as the idea can be nothing more than an idea, and
can hardly ever approach to a reality, the moment men begin to
congregate themselves together in cities. Doubtless, it is indispensable
to all our notions of comfort, and of the due independence of social
life--it is, indeed, one of the main elements of the constitution of a
family, that a certain degree of isolation should be maintained and
respected; but we submit to the candid observer, that the only
difference between English cities and continental ones in this respect
is, that Englishmen aim at "horizontal" independence, foreigners at
"vertical." Englishmen form their line of location every man shoulder to
shoulder, or rather, elbows in ribs; foreigners mostly get upon one
another's backs and heads, and form a living pyramid like the clown and
boys at Astley's. By this arrangement, however, it comes to pass, that
for the same number of inhabitants much more ground is occupied by an
English than by a continental town; and also, that each single dwelling
is of mean, or, at the most, moderate architectural appearance, the
great condition of elevation being wanting, and the power of
ornamentation being generally kept closely under by the limitation of
each individual's pecuniary resources. Practically, we contend, there is
quite as much comfort (we think, indeed, in many cases more) in the
continental manner of arranging houses as in the English one: while the
former allows of and encourages architectural display, and indeed
requires a much more solid system of construction; but the latter leads
to the running up of cheap, slight, shabby-genteel houses, and represses
all attempts at external ornament as superfluous from its expense. Upon
this subject, we appeal to the experience of all who have dwelt for any
length of time on the Continent, not to those who merely run across the
water for six weeks or so, and come back as blind as they went; but
rather to those who have given themselves time and opportunity enough
for the film of national prejudice to wear away from before their eyes,
and have been at length able to use that natural good sense with which
most Englishmen are blessed by Providence. To them we would say, that
the plan of several families tenanting one large dwelling, clubbing
together, as it were, for the erection of a handsome and commodious
edifice, and just so far sacrificing their independence as to consent
occasionally to run up against their neighbour in the common court-yard,
or perchance to see his coat-tails whisking by their door up or down
stairs, is the more sensible of the two. There is practically a great
saving of walls, of spaces of support, as the architects term it, in
this plan: great saving in roofing; and, from the mere dimensions of the
building, a certain degree of grandeur is necessarily given to it. This
plan requires the edifice to be built court-fashion, and sometimes will
admit of a good garden being appended: it also requires that a most
useful servant, a porter, in a suitable lodge, should be kept by the
little social community; and every body knows what an useful body the
porter, or _concierge_, as the French call him, may be made. Just as
bachelors join together in clubs to the great promotion of their
individual comfort, and certainly to the outward advantage of a city, so
should families join together for their civic residences; they would all
derive benefit from their mutual support, and the appearance of a town
would be immediately improved.
We do not say that any joining together of houses should take place in
country, nor even in suburban residences. No; there let every man have a
house to himself; the foundation of the whole system is quite different:
and there is also a certain class of persons who should always have
separate dwellings in a town; but to these subjects we will revert on
another occasion. We will only allude to one objection which the
fastidious Englishman will be sure to raise: if you live under the same
roof with one or more families he will say, you must necessarily be
acquainted with all the members of the same: you must, in fact, know
what they are going to have for dinner, and thus must be acquainted with
all the secrets of their household economy. Well, so one would
undoubtedly expect to be the case: unfortunately, however, for the
theory, the practical working of the thing is just the contrary: we do
not know of any town where so much isolation is kept up as in Paris,
though there men crowd together under the same roof like bees into the
common hive. We have lived ourselves, between the epochs of our bachelor
or embryo state, and that of our full-blown paternal maturity, on every
floor of a Parisian house, from the _entresol_ just over the stable,
where we could lean out of our window of a morning, smoke our hookah,
and talk to the "Jockey Anglais" who used to rub down our bit of blood,
up to the _Septieme_, where in those celestial regions we could walk
about upon our little terrace, look over the gardens of the Tuileries,
('twas in the Rue de Rivoli, gentle reader!) all the way to St Cloud and
Meudon, one of the sweetest and gayest prospects in the world, by the
by, and hold soft communings either with the stars or our next
neighbours--(but thereon hangs a tale!) and yet never did we know the
name even of any other soul in the house, nor they ours. Oh! we have had
many an adventure up and down that interminable staircase, when we used
to skip up two hundred and twenty steps to get to our eyry; many a
blow-up with our old porter: she was a good soul, too, was old Madame
Nicaise; many a time have we seen flounces and redingotes coming in and
out of doors as we went up or down; but actually we cannot call to mind
the reality, the living vision of a single individual in that vasty
mansion. On the contrary, we used to think them all a set of unsociable
toads, and, in our days of raw Anglicism, we used to think that we might
be just as well called in to "assist" at some of the charming soirees
which we used to hear of from the porter: we did not then know that a
Parisian likes to be "chez lui" as he calls it, quite as much as an
Englishman. We should have lived on in that house, gentle reader, _ad
infinitum_; but one day on going up-stairs, we saw in ominous letters,
on a new brass plate, "au troisieme, de la cour," LEGRAND, TAILLEUR.
Horror of horrors! 'twas our own man! we had not paid him for two years:
we gave _conge_ that evening, and were off to the Antipodes.
"ROGUES IN OUTLINE."