mmii m$mmM III fefe '?!il^-'' o 0' ^H -71, vOc x'^ o, * cf-. '■ c 0' sV ..-^^ ii'y ^:;- ,0 o. . A^' ^ -■■■ ■ '' ^- ■-- ^ .#^<. ' -^ v^^ 'K %;*^>- xV ss'-, ^. '^" s"- <«>• ,0- ciH -''^. vV- ^ tS"- * rCC\ S^ A 'o 'if' \->^' ,^^ ''t<. \ vO o. i\ %f o- ,. -■ - " / 'c' V » •^^ ^^ v\^^ '' ; ■^. .^^^ .)J-.' .x^''% o. CN .:':f>^o> ■.\^ -^^ V V * » " ''o/:-\<^ ■ %'op^^A .;r ' < '^f, \ .^^ ,0q .-^^ O, 't u ■Ll^t^^ CHARING CROSS TO ST. PAUL'S CHANCERY LANE CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. Introduction I II. Charing Cross 20 III. The Strand . . 63 IV. The Strand {couduued) 104 V. The Law Courts • 147 VI. Fleet Street . 184 VII. Ludgate Hill • 213 ^TII. St, Paul's • 238 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Chancery Lane Flower Girls at Charing Cross Trafalgar Square Charing Cross King Charles's Statue . Morley's Hotel, Trafalgar Square St. Martin's in the Fields Busses .... Fish Shop at Charing Cross In the Strand The Strand Exeter Hall Terry's Theatre The Gaiety Wellington Street The Lyceum Burleigh Street, Strand Frontispiece PAGE 23 29 33 37 41 45 53 59 67 71 77 81 86 89 93 99 X L ist of Illustrations The Strand, by Somerset House Somerset House . St. Mary-i.e-Strand St. Mary-le-Strand from the East Old Houses in Holywei.i. Street St. Clement Danes The Corner of Essex Street . The Law Courts , Entrance to the Courts The Clock Tower of the Law Courts Fleet Street St. Dunstan's in the West The Windows of "Punch" St. Bride's Passage "Storting Life" Office "Daily News" Office . The Railway Bridge, T,udgate Hili Ludgate Circus Wild's Hotel St. Martin's, Ludgate . St. Paul's Churchyard . West Door of St. Paul's PAGE I I I 119 129 161 171 ■85 189 192 193 197 203 214 217 223 231 243 255 Charinor Cross to St, Paul's INTRODUCTION We cannot — at least I cannot, to put it more modestly — reconstruct in mind the London of the far, very far past. I have set myself the task often, and laboriously tried to ac- complish it, but it will not shape itself, that far-away Roman London : it will not shape itself to my eyes or my mind. I cannot see the London with the cinctures of the great wall and the seven gates and the double cioors to each gate. The historical sugges- tion conveys to my mind no manner of idea. I cannot get back to a Roman London — a fortress London ; I can hardly believe in it. But lest any one should take my words too literally, and should assume me to be B Charing Cross to St. PauTs guilty of an absurd scepticism which ought to be instantly confuted by the citation of over- whelming evidence from history, I hasten to explain that I am not really sceptical in that sense. I have not the smallest doubt about the existence of the Roman London ; I only mean to say that I cannot believe in it in the sense of realising it and understanding what it would be to live in it. I have a friend who only cares about romances and novels which tell of the time with which he is familiar ; he will not condescend to read even the finest story of the chivalric age. " I don't believe in a man in armour," he says. Now my friend is, apart from this curious self- accepted limitation to his reading, a well-read man ; he is perfectly well aware that in olden days knights went to battle encased in steel ; I have no doubt he could, if need were, favour any company with a dissertation on the various kinds of armour in which men of different chivalric orders and ages bedizened and defended themselves. But his imagina- tion does not realise the mail-clad hero as Introduction a living creature, as a man and a brother with a soul to be saved, and a heart to be perplexed and betossed, and in that sense he does not believe in the man in armour. In that sense, and that sense only, I fail to put faith in Roman London. It lives for history ; it does not live for me. I have somewhat of a similar notion with regard to Rome — a notion which I fancy I share with most people, even with some scholarly persons, if they would only ac- knowledge it. I cannot reconstruct in my own mind the Rome of the Republican days. In vain I read and study and survey the ground itself; no Rome rises for me but the Imperial Rome — the Rome of the Caesars — the Rome of the Empire, or at all events, the Rome of those days which were blossoming or decaying into empire — the Rome of the first and greatest Imperator. I am inclined to think that it is so with most persons, and that the Rome which they can see in the mind's eye is the Rome which Horace and Juvenal and Martial and Persius have Chai^ino; Cross to St. PanTs described for us. London is real for me only so far back as when she rises before me mediaeval ; I can see her, recognise her, study her, appreciate her, and even live in her as the London of Chaucer ; beyond that day she is not London for me, but might be confounded with Troy or Persepolis or the capital of Cloud-cuckoo-land. Of that mediaeval London the most living, the most vital, the most real part, is that stretch of thoroughfare which connects Charing Cross with St. Paul's, hi this volume the artist with the pencil — who plays a much more important part than the would- be artist with the pen- — has taken from Charing Cross to St. Paul's for his province. This was, this is, the backbone of London. Mediaeval London grew up around it. The Strand was the baldric which belted Court and Parliament together ; the town grew up along and about the Strand as a coral island grows in the sea. Something of that growth and its gradual realisation is brought home to one's mind rather oddly during any session Introduction of the House of Commons. It happens in this way : A stranger standing in the inner lobby of the House of Commons at the moment when the House adjourns for the night is surprised to see an official rush into the midst of the dispersing crowd and to hear him shout, in tone loud as that of some Homeric hero, the mystic question, "Who Qfoes home ? " There is no answer — the man with the Homeric voice does not seem to expect any. The stranger naturally asks for an explanation. The explanation is' found in the fact that once upon a time London and Westminster were separate and widely-separated cities — a sort of desert of barbarism lay between. But a desert is not necessarily a place absolutely unpeopled. The Eastern desert has its Bedouins ; the desert between Westminster and London had its footpads and its mounted highway- men. People made up parties to ride home together, themselves and their servants, for common safety. So the official of the Houses of Parliament had it as one of his C/iariuQ- Cross to St. Paii/'s regular duties to shout out in the lobbies and the corridors the invitation which called on home -going people to close their ranks, to form this or that group, and to ride together across the perils of Lincoln's Inn Fields, or close by the skirts of Alsatia. Now, when the times are all changed, when not one member of Parliament out of a baker's dozen goes Cityward on his way home, when the highwayman has disappeared even out of our literature — unless where perchance he still lingers and lurks in the yellowing paper and the blurred print of some mean little publication for boys — still the nightly cry of "Who goes home?" is heard re-echoing across the lobby and through the corridors, and even along the terrace of the House of Commons. Long may it sound ! May its echo never grow less ! May no rage of modern innova- tion, realism, or utility abolish that function and silence that call ! It keeps alive in our minds — in the minds of those who have minds — some idea of the gradual growth of Introduction London ; we think of the nightly wayfarers riding or driving eastward, and we are there- by reminded of the growth of the Strand, and the part that growth played in the crea- tion of what we know as London. Do not let us assume too hastily that all since that time has been mere and sheer progress. We do not now make up parties to go home together for common safety, but might it not be well if we still sometimes did so } The highwaymen are gone, to be sure, but the robbers now occasionally — indeed, not in- frequently — take to the use of the revolver, and I have heard travelled men say that there are few places which have ever really scared them of nights like the Thames Em- bankment. However, I am not now en- gaged in a study of social progress, or a comparison of the virtues and the vices, of the dangers and the protections of this time and any other. My concern is to point to the fact that London grew up along and around the Strand, so that he who fares with Mr. Pennell, and if I may say so, with me, Charing Cross to St. Pauls from Charing Cross to St. Paul's, will have trodden the main highroad of England's national and imperial history. Palaces grew up along the Strand — we must remember that it was then a strand, and that the few houses built on its south side looked on the Thames — palaces began to grow up, for the great nobles naturally liked to have houses not quite too far either from Westminster or from the City. The younger nobles, and some of the elders just as well, no doubt, were fond of going down into the City ; the nobles borrowed money there from the acknowledged money-lenders, and from the jewellers and the silversmiths. The City wives had the repute of being pretty and coquettish ever since the days of Chaucer, and, perhaps, indeed, since long before: the young "swells" loved to go down to the City ; the citizens' wives were not ashamed then to sell their wares openly in their shops ; they sold embroidered shirts for the gallants, and gorgeous laced under- garments for the ladies ; and one may fancy Introdzidion from the dramatic literature of the time that many a middle-aged gentleman professed to have gone down to the shops of the City merely in search of pretty gifts of lace and embroidery to bring home to his wife and his daughters. In the later Elizabethan days and throughout the time of King James the City became a favourite haunt of gallants who loved to smoke tobacco. They did not call it " smoking tobacco " then — they called it "drinking tobacco"; they inhaled the tobacco into their throats, and they, not unnaturally, called that drinking it. Then, when there were any great difficulties in the wars of the sovereign, when troops had to be levied and money raised, when foreign war seemed to become inevitable, or domes- tic rebellion was whispered of in the North or in the West, then the City became a place of signal importance, and the ministers of the King were none too proud to go there and stand, metaphorically, plumed cap in hand, and beseech of the City magnates to rally with their money-bags around the Throne. lo Charing Cross to Sf. PauTs The City was almost always devoted and loyal — always, indeed, unless and until the kings entirely overdid the business of sover- eign kingship, as some of them certainly did, and then the City got together its trainbands and manfully stood by the country. But, in the meantime — for we have been anticipat- ing a good deal — the City was becoming gradually of more and more importance to the King and the Court and the nobles, and so the stately palaces began to arise along the Strand. Many an ancient water-gate, looking curiously out of date to-day amid the upsetting and demolishing and reconstruct- ing newnesses of the Thames Embankment, tells of that ancient time when the Strand was open to the river, even as the iron mooring- rings on some of the street walls of Ravenna remind one of the days when Ravenna was another Venice, and forewarn us of the days when Venice is to be another Ravenna. The narrow belt of the occupied Strand began to broaden and to thicken ; the- palaces Introduction 1 1 increased on either side, shutting out the river and the fields ; then the houses began to jostle each other ; the poor little Roman bath, stone- cold in its niche, got gradually blocked up and hidden away, and had grown to be almost as much of a curiosity five centuries ago as it is in our own day ; the river was beginning to be more and more occupied by wharfs and warehouses ; the Westminster quarter was sending its offshoots down along the line of streets ; the City was sending its offshoots up along the line of river ; the Strand was turning from the Strand properly so called into the Strand improperly so called — as we have known it all our lives, and our grandfathers and grandmothers before us. Between certain palaces of nobles and shops of burghers there ran green and pleasant lanes down to the Thames — then, and for long after, a silver stream, and in the season hawthorn still blossomed in the lanes and honeysuckle made them fragrant. This was on the south side of the Strand. On the north side there were glimpses of the fields and the country — 12 Charing Cross to St. Paul's glimpses growing more and more tantalising as time went on, and as the movement of civilisation trod down the old beauties and delights of the Strand. The Strand, how- ever, had magnificent compensation for its losses. It was like some rustic maiden who has been married by a prince : the rustic maiden wears no necklace of beads or chaplet of wild flowers any more, but she has a coronet on her head and a strinQ^ of diamonds round her neck ; she does not dance on the village green and under the maypole any longer, but she moves in the stately figures of the Court minuet. Which is the better part ? That would have to be left to the village maiden to tell for herself, if haply she could tell it, which she probably could not. The Strand ceased to be the green shore of the Thames, and became the highway of kings and of history. Along that Strand either way moved the stately procession of Eng- land's imperial life ; captive princes, captive kings, have passed along there ; every English sovereign — I believe I may say Introdtiction 1 3 every one : is there a single exception ? — has passed in triumph along that favoured thoroughfare ; the funeral processions of queens have gone one v^ay, the funeral pro- cessions of heroes and conquerors have gone sometimes the one way and sometimes the other ; even down to our own prosaic days the Strand has been allowed to keep up its character as an imperial highway. I can re- member the funeral of the Duke of Welling- ton, that "most high and mighty prince," as he might well have been called — Marlborough was so called in the official records of his funeral pageantry. Men and women of only middle age can remember the wedding pro- cession of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the thanksgiving ceremonial when the fever-stricken Prince was given back to life. All this kind of moving splendour the Strand has seen ; for this it has had to sacrifice its early countrified ways, its hedges, its flowers, and the river waves that melted on its banks. Of late years, perhaps, it is a little falling 14 Charing Cross to St. PauTs away in its august adornments. The pro- cessions of princes are becoming infrequent ; we have no captive kings any more ; and when a foreign sovereign comes here of his own goodwill and pleasure he does not always care to fare in public array along the Strand. No set of devoted Stuartists now make their way along the Strand, and, sud- denly breaking out with appropriate emblems and devices on Ludgate Hill, vociferously proclaim the reign of James the Third. Even the Lord Mayor's Show begins to have less of a grip than it had upon the mind and the memory of the Strand — it only holds a sort of year-to-year lease of existence. It was, to be sure, revived and refurbished last year or the year before last, let us say, but who can tell whether the spirit of modernity — I have seen the word somewhere lately — or of econ- omy, or we know not what, may not suspend its appearance for a year or two, and after that interval, supposing it to come, what may not happen ? Has the Strand outlived its grand characteristic } " No longer steel-clad Introduction 1 5 warriors ride along thy " — something or other — " shore." No, indeed, none such, except only the men in armour of the Lord Mayor's Show, and, alas ! who believes in them ? The morfe real, flesh-like, living they are, the more they are incredible and impossible ; the more significantly do they proclaim that the Strand has no longer anything to do with the Middle Ages. Well, perhaps the Strand is not altogether the worse for that — perhaps it is not wholly and merely a sufferer and a victim to the wrongdoing of time because it has lost the mail-clad warriors and even the proces- sions of kings. I can well remember reading in one of the earlier volumes of State Trials the story of some murder committed at the setting on of this or that great disguised — I mean concealed — personage, some personage carefully kept in the background. The murder was not found out for many days, and why, does my reader think ? Because the murdered body was hidden away " among the dunghills on the Strand at the end of Drury Lane." 1 6 Charing Cross to St. PauVs Among the dunghills on the Strand a murdered corpse lying for days undiscovered ! Are we not on the whole somewhat better off now? If we miss — supposing we ever do miss — the mail-clad warriors and the triumphant or captive kings, have we not the better of it, seeing that we are free of the murdered bodies stowed away amid the dung- hills ? Then the Mohocks — those awful gangs of " swell " rowdies who amused them- selves by rolling women in casks down Ludgate Hill at midnight ; and "tipping the lion," that is, flattening the nose, for peaceful and honest citizens returning home belated ; and "pinking," and "sweating," and " tumb- lincr," and all the rest of it^is it not some- thing that we are free of these young " bloods" and their brutal practical jokes, and their torturing and witless buffoonery ? I may sa)-, perhaps, in order to be fair while I am deal- ing with this part of the history of London, that I believe there has been the most un- reasonable exaooreration about the stories of the London Mohocks, just as there has been. Introduction 1 7 perhaps, about the perils of the Thames Em- bankment in our own times. The Mohocks frightened Swift. He writes, in one of his letters to Stella, that people in London were afraid tO stir out late at night because of them. The Spectator talks a good deal about them, and Gay, of course, has not left them unnoticed. Still, I cannot help believing, even from the very evidence of the period, that a few mad isolated pranks were ex- aggerated into a system of outrage, and that a brutal practical joke upon some wandering Paphian of Drury Lane was made to terrify respectable matrons and maids who were anxious to attend balls and parties late o' nights. If I am quite mistaken in this im- pression I should be only too glad that any one well acquainted with the London records and statistics of the time, such as they were, should point me to the trustworthy evidence which shows that the Mohocks were a really prolonged, and a systematic trouble to the London night-life of the time of Swift and Addison. c 1 8 Charing Cross to St. Paiifs Even if, however, I should be right in my contention, that Mill not touch the point I strive to make when I insist that, on the whole, we who traverse the Strand have not lost utterly when we lost the mail-clad men and the processions of kings. Supposing, as I do suppose, that the doings and the dangers of the Mohocks were grossly exaggerated, what then ? The panic was a distinct trouble ; the scare was a very practical nuisance. We should not be much frightened just now if we heard of Mohock Q;anQ^s east of Charino^ Cross of nio^hts. We should qto to the Lyceum Theatre, and the Gaiety, and the Adelphi, and Drury Lane, and Covent Garden, and all the other theatres, just the same ; we should leave the police to look after us^and they would look after us — and the Mohocks, if they should present them- selves, would be simply " run in," and would get ever so many days' imprisonment when brought up at Bow Street next morning. Does medicevalism mean picturesqueness, and modernity comfort ? I do not venture to Introduction 1 9 answer. And supposing it be so, which London — ■ mediaeval or modern — has the better part? "Alas!" as Hamlet says, "I know not." II CHARIXCx CROSS The Londoner as a rule never sees London. He never looks at it. He knows it all too well. He has grown used to it. He has given up looking at it and thinking about it. He may be very fond of it all the same. A man may be very fond of his dauohter, but if on coming: home alone some night he happens to see a light shining from the windows of her bedroom he does not stop beneath and contemplate the gleaming panes with eyes of reverential poetic love, as he used to contemplate the lioht in her mother's window Iouq- aQ-o, before he was married. So with the Londoner and London. He mav love the Charing Cross 2 1 place, or, at all events, his own nook of it ; he may be happy with his friends and his cronies and his favourite haunts, and his dinners and clubs and theatres and Parlia- ment, and kll the rest of it ; but he goes along Pall Mall or the Strand and he sees nothing. The born Londoner is worst of all in that way. The resident Londoner who came to town from the provinces or from Ireland or Scotland remembers a time when he could not study London half enough for his own satisfaction, when every street had its own especial interest for him, and he looked at the houses as if he were inquiring into the riddle and the story of each of them. But he too subsides before long into the condition of the born Londoner, and he goes his daily way apathetic, and the Strand is a thoroughfare for him and Charing Cross is a crowded place where he has to dodge the omnibuses, and Strand and Charing Cross are nothing more to him. The monotony of his daily movement has made him blind to London, as the monotony of the snow 2 2 Charing Cross to St. Paid's makes men blind while they are mounting the Alpine steeps. Happily there comes now and again a stranger with fresh, artistic eyes — an observer and a man of genius who re-creates London for us Londoners, and shows us what it really is — what it was to our own eyes while they could yet see it for themselves. Take, for example — a very remarkable example indeed — the drawings reproduced in this book, which are by the hand of a stranger. Mr. Pennell illustrates the street life of London from Charing Cross to St. Paul's. He reminds one of the familiar magician of the East who holds in his hand a little drop of ink, and somebody gazing steadily in sees there the realities of some scene and some life long unknown to him. Mr. Pennell takes his little drop of ink, and he dips his pen in it ; and behold, in a moment we are all gazing into the street life of London. We are more than gazing into it ; we are living in it — we are of it. These sketches were all evidently taken on the spot. How \ K X fj 5.U FLOWER GIRLS AT CHARLNG CROSS Charing Cross 25 else should they be taken ? — I can imagine some reader asking. Well, what I mean is that they were not taken by a man looking out of a window — say a man looking out of a window in Morley's Hotel, and sketch- ing composedly the crowds far below him. Nor were they taken by a man seated com- fortably in a carriage or a hansom cab stationary at the bottom of a street. Any one who will take the trouble to observe the sketches in the whole effect of each of them will see at once what I mean. These pictures come from the very middle of the crowd. A friend of mine made some capital Piccadilly sketches from a place of elevation on the roof of a cab ; but the sketches had all the appearance of that quiet contemplation, that study from the upper boxes, which such a position would naturally give. The painter was drawing something which, if I may put it so, had nothing to do with him. He was drawing the street life of Piccadilly as he might sit on one of the terraces at Berne and sketch 26 Charing Cross to St. P mil's the outlines of the Oberland mountain - range. But look at these Charing Cross sketches. Why, you feel as if you could see the artist running and plunging through the crowd. I think I can see him taking his stand com- posedly in one of the " refuges," and there steadily working away at his sketch until he has finished it, every figure and every house, and then plunging in among the omnibuses and cabs and crowd again, and shouldering his way until he gets another favourable place and makes another sketch. How he must have loved to do it all ! How- he must have revelled in it ! How he has got the very atmosphere of each scene, the very life of each house! "The very houses seem asleep," says Wordsworth ; and he was quite right, because he was looking at a scene of London in the early dawn. But in these sketches — sketches of the midday, most of them— the houses are all broad awake. Every group in the street, every single figure even, has a business and a Ckariitg Cross 27 story of its own. What would one not give for such a series of pictures of the Hfe of that London which Dickens knew and made so real ? That London is disappearing fast. There will soon have to be an edition of Dickens with copious explanatory notes on every page, or the younger readers will not know half the time what the author is talking about. Why, at this day a man or woman of twenty-one thinks of the Thames at Westminster as always bordered by a stately and somewhat monotonous embank- ment. What does he or she know about the rickety wharfs, the oozy old piers, the huge dark piles of warehouses, the tumble- down little old public-houses that once varie- gated the banks of the silent highway there } Even the elders forget all too soon how things were a few years ago. Only the other day I learned with much surprise — at first with a little or, indeed, not a little, incredulity — that the beadle of the Bur- lington Arcade is gone, that there has not been this long time back any beadle at the 2 8 Charino; Cross to Sf. PaiiTs Burlington Arcade. Can this be so, or was saucy youth merely playing pranks with me ? Is he indeed gone, that stately, gorgeous creature who used to fill my young days with awe ? Why, he was always there when I was a young man, and I pass through the Burlington Arcade a good deal still, but I never doubted that my old friend the beadle was always there. To say I never missed him would not explain the condition of things ; of course, if I had missed him I should have found out all about him. I assumed him ; I took him for granted ; he was there for me, with a waistcoat which defied the hand of time and a cocked hat to which the gods had given immortal youth. And he is gone — has long been gone, they say. Who shall explain to the younger generation all about Northumberland House and the lion that used to surmount it — the lion that a credulous crowd was one day persuaded to believe it saw wagging its tail ? Already Temple Bar is beginning to be forgotten ; it will be disbelieved in by TRAFALGAR SQUARE Charing Cross 31 the day after to-morrow or thereabouts. Soon a time will come when Londoners will take it for granted, if they think about the matter at all, that Addison may have sauntered along Shaftesbury Avenue, and that Sir Roger de Coverley may have put up at the Inns of Court Hotel. That was a digression. I come back to Charing- Cross and these sketches of streets and street life. They give a surprising impression of crowd and movement ; a nervous, retiring person almost shudders as he looks on them ; " I should not like to be hustling in that crowd," he thinks, "and dodging those cabs and omnibuses." In that masterpiece of farce-comedy — I do not know what else to call it — Ben Jonson's " Bartholomew Fair," the reader seems to feel the very dust of the fair getting into his eyes and his throat and making him thirsty. So in these sketches the confusion of the crowd makes a nervous man feel uncomfortable. He seems to be afraid to stand and quietly study them ; he feels as 32 Charing Cross to St. Paul's if he could only get darting glimpses at them, as the artist himself must often have done. Some strange old picturesque front of a house strikes him much. Is there a house like that, he asks himself, a house like that so close to Charing Cross, where I thought everything was commonplace, and most things were new? He goes and tests the truth of the sketch by finding out the house. Yes, to be sure, there it is ; there is the quaint, picturesque old-world front with the carvings over its windows. It is there, and I pass the place every day, and I never saw it before. Some day one of us will cross Trafalgar Square, and, suddenly looking up in a moment of awakened consciousness, will become pos- sessed of the fact that the old National Gallery with its pepper-boxes is gone, and that some structure altogether different in style stands in its place. He will ask some benevolent passer-by about the matter, and will be told that the old building was taken down years ago. 0. CHARING CROSS D Charing Cross 35 To a dreamy sort of personage like that — dreamy as a habit, but still interested in most things — these sketches of London ought to have an infinite charm. They give him the street life exactly as it is, but yet as he could not see it for himself; they give him the crowd without the dis- comfort of being actually in the crowd. If his dreams have a way of taking the form of stories and character studies, there are figures and groups enough here to feed him with material. Look at that young man who is standing to have his shoes blacked within sight of Eleanor's Cross. He is a well-made, well-set-up young man. He bends forward with eyes studiously turned downward. We cannot see his eyes, his back is turned to us ; but we can know quite well from the bend of his head that he is looking carefully down. What is he contemplating } — the process of blacking his boots which is being carried on by the spry little lad, whose whole character can be read in the shape of his head and in so 36 Charing Cross to St. PauTs much of his nose as can be seen under the peak of his cap, his head being bowed over his work ? No, I don't think the young man is wholly absorbed in the shoe-cleaning process ; but I think his dress shows that he is from the country, and I don't fancy he likes being boot-blacked in the full sight of all Charing Cross, and so he looks down to hide his modesty. He is at the time of life when young men, especially from the country, really fancy that London is look- ing at them. I take this to be a very ingenuous, true-hearted young man. He is something in the engineering line, I fancy. I have a notion that he is staying at the Golden Cross hard by, and that he has just come out from the portals of that hotel, which must always have a tender interest for those who love David Copper- field. But I do not suppose that our young ensfineer went to the Golden Cross for the sake of David Copperfield — he is too young to care much about Dickens ; but if he has not a sweetheart in London then I know KIXG CHARLES'S STATUE Charing Cross 39 nothing of the world of fiction. Why, he is thinking at this very moment what an awful thing it would be if she were to drive by just then, and see him standing there with his trousers tucked up and having his boots blacked. But why did he have his boots blacked in the street ? Why did he not have them looked to at the Golden Cross ? He did — why, of course he did. But do you not see that the day is very muddy ? Do you not observe the highly -tucked -up trousers of the careful man with the eyeglass who is picking his steps across the street ? Our youth came out from the Golden Cross spick and span as regards his boots, but as he was hurrying along the street an omnibus bore down upon him and drove him into a puddle, and it would take too much time to go back to the hotel, and he just came on the boot- cleaning boy, and he is in haste to go and meet his sweetheart, who will be walking by accident in a Covent Garden flower arcade, and he certainly would not go to 40 Charing Cross to St. Pauls meet her in dirty boots ; and so you see how it all occurs. He will go to the Lyceum to- nio-ht ; he cannot see his sweetheart in the evening. Her people do not consider him quite up to her social level ; but I am per- suaded that he will get on, and will make a position for himself, and win the girl yet. You can see all this in his strono- shoulders and his general air of self-reliance. "Ah, bear in mind that garden was enchanted !" These words are from Edgar Poe's charm- ing verses, "To Helen." They explain how and why the poet came to understand all the phases of Helen's character, all the feelings of her heart, her "silently serene sea of pride," how boundless her ambition, yet " how fathomless her capacity for love." He only got a glimpse of her upturned face "and of her eyes upturned, alas! in sorrow" — one midnight in a garden, years ago. How did he come to learn all about her and to understand her in that moment's glance ? He explains it thus — " Bear in mind that .s-^-"^ ■'••'' ^i ^^4=^ Mte": _-iiO' i; 1 . /W S^^rt^A^-^*"'^ ^^SC^^ i^^^-'m?x" J' ^es:;_r-x^.3 'tW«iM5^^^5 ■^y^H' L ;----.-. Chariiio; Cross . 43 garden was enchanted ! " .So I say of the streets ol Lf)ndon — in this particular instance, of Charing Cross. Bear in mind that the scene is enchanted, I shall go on this assumption all the time I am reading London street life through these sketches. That is how one comes to learn so easily the whole story of our young engineer, and even to know that he is an engineer. Can we not t(,'ll something of the story of that sedate; and carefully -made -up man, in the drawing on page T,y, who is crossing the street and holds a little child by the hand ? I Ic is a widower, clearly, and one who, I think, will never marry again. Idiere is something of a set and s(juare resolve; about his prosaic, practical appearance which seems to tell of a man who will bear his loss bravely and not make; futile attempt to repair it. How entirely different a picture is given by the other man, on page 33, who, with a little girl, is cross- ing the street somewhere near the; young engineer! This man is jaunty, bright, very well dressed, very well satisfied with himself 44 Charing Cross to St. PauTs Either he is a young married man rather proud of walking out with his child and of beinof allowed to take care of her all alone, or the child is only a little sister of his — but this latter theory somehow does not quite satisfy me. No ; I am sure he is a married man, and his wife is well and happy, but has not been able to come out with him, and he has taken the little girl to be his companion. What different ways people have of crossing a street ! Some men have such nerves that they can wind in and out among the cabs, and carts, and omnibuses, in imminent momentary danger which makes a mere looker-on tremble, and they never seem to think that they are in danger, but avoid every impingement and collision with the easy skill of a bull-fighter. See that man there — the wheel of a hansom has just brushed him and he steps ever so little aside and is unharmed. But the next moment he has come right in the way of a tearing omnibus, and the driver halloos to him and he coolly looks up and then allows just m. ffifl 'fi'i'^'il'" ™ '■■■>:'■ ■ « \! (' ^ bT. MAKTIN S IN TIIK FIELU.S Charing Cross 47 enough space for the omnibus to pass, while at the same time he contrives to keep his head barely clear of the huge planks that are being dragged on a great cart at his other side. The special danger of the London streets is in the variety of the wheeled traffic. You manage to get safely in front of an omnibus and quite clear of it, but you had not noticed the hansom cab which was coming rapidly along on the other side of the omnibus, and which now darts between you and the sidewalk for which you were making. While you are trying to dodge the cab, behold a mail-cart threatens you from one direction and a bicycle throbs its shrill flight and rattles its bell at you from another. The traffic up and down Broadway, New York, is prob- ably greater than that of any part of London, but then it is nearly all heavy traffic — waggons and street cars and tramcars. There are few hansoms, few light carriages, and therefore few surprises for the pedestrian trying to cross from one side to the other. 48 Charing Cross to St. Paur s To do our cab-drivers, especially the drivers of hansom cabs, justice, it must be said that they are wonderfully skilful and careful. If they drove with the recklessness of the Parisian drivers, London streets would be covered with the killed and wounded. Few sights inspire me more with curious admira- tion than to see a London gamin — perhaps a newsboy, perhaps a lad who gathers up street refuse — to see the joyous recklessness with which he disports himself among the wheels of the carriages and the hoofs of the horses. It is as if he could not be hurt by them, as if the danger that existed for others was no dano^er at all for him. He reminds me of the boy or girl of some far southern island disporting in the long sea-rollers flung in upon the beach. This southern island child is amphibious ; has no more thought of danger from the waves than of cianger from the pebbles on the beach ; tumbles about as easily as if swimming in the sea and racing on the shore were just the same thing. So with the London street gamin. He is quite Charing Cross 49 used to running in and running 'about amid the wheels and the hoofs, and he doesn't mind, bless you, and as I heard one of them say one day, " There ain't no harm going to happen to me." And I don't believe that any harm does happen to him in that way. But look at some women crossing a street, I do not say that all women are bad at it. Some are composed, self-possessed, and majestic ; they sail in and out among the cabs and omnibuses like stately yachts through a fleet of ironclads. Such a woman is now crossing near the Strand end of Morley's Hotel (see page 41); she holds a little girl by the hand and guides her ; she moves slowly, steadily, hardly seeming to look either to the right or to the left, and yet with her calm eyes wide open to every- thing that concerns herself and her charge. Look at her — is she not a typical London figure ? See how well she is dressed — with her fur-trimmed jacket tight over her firm, opulent bust, her skirts kilted exactly to the K 50 Charing Cross to St. Paiifs riorht heis^ht for a walk in London streets, her bonnet of the style next to the very newest — she would not think it quite right to have the very, very newest style of bonnet — her veil is drawn tightly across the upper part of her face and reaches just down to the tip of her nose ; she is proper, prim, sensible, conscientious, innocent — probably never had a wrono- thought in her life ; her views, indeed, are limited — propriety is everything with her ; she is the sort of woman who would not consider it by any means proper to wear very smart and lacey petticoats or other such garments ; she has not two ideas in her head, and neither she nor anybody else would know what she could do with them if she had. Just now, however, I am watching her as she crosses the street, and I am full of admiration for her cool, successful composure. That is the woman who would not wince in a cold shower-bath when she had just pulled the string. I need not follow her in her passage — she will get across quite safely. But see how other Charing Cross 5 i women — the great majority of women — conduct themselves when they have to make a more or less perilous crossing. They begin with a sudden dart, then they think better of it, and come to a dead stand in the middle of the street just at the wrong time ; then they try to run back again, and their affrighted gambolings sometimes stop the march of a streetful of traffic. I have seen women on the footpath of some perfectly quiet and little-frequented street pause a moment and take a lonq; and anxious look up and down the thoroughfare, satisfy them- selves that no vehicle of any kind is in sight either way, and then gather up their drapery in the most awkward and ungainly fashion and run as fast as their legs can carry them across to the other side, which they reach all panting and red with the air of ship- wrecked people who have just managed to get on to a rock. I have seen women pause and look anxiously round and let the moment pass when there was a safe gap in the traffic, and then, just as the noisy waves begin to S2 CharinQ- Cross to St. Pauls '.!> roll on again, suddenly make the dart at the wrong time, to the imminent peril of their lives. Worst of all is when there are two or three women together. They start off at the same time, but the moment they are in motion each seems to take a different view of the duties of the occasion. One thinks she had better rush on ; another espies danger in that way, and quickly resolves to run back : a third comes to the conclusion that the best thincr to do is to remain in the middle of the street. If each would be content to follow her own impulse and do nothing else it would not be quite so bad, but each wants to coerce her companions to do what she is doing, and there is a scene of pulling and pushing and arguing, and how any one of them ever comes alive out of that peril is more than I can understand. I do not want to put undue limitation on the riofhts of women, but I must sav that I do not think a woman — at all e\ents a modern and civilised woman — ever ouoht to run. Atalanta. of course — well and Q;ood — she was ^■ ^Ji^S' ;e ' .r: Charing Cross 55 ci sort of professional, and she got hcrscH up for the task ; she did not wear loni^ skirts and high-heeled shoes and a bonnet with a h'ttle shrubbery or orchard or aviary on the top of it. Camiha, too, had a right to run — her tunic was short, and the grasses did not bend under her lightsome buskins — at least so the poet says, and poets ought to know — but the woman of modern civilisation and dress ought never to run. We see a good deal of the soldier in these sketches. He is mostly a cavalryman, with his cap on the side of his head and his curious air of lounging alertness, not exactly swagger — there is too much self- complacency and self-content in him to call for tlie airs of a man who feels that he is bound to swagger. Can one wonder that the cavalryman is such a hero and idol to the servant-girl } Look at him, with his scarlet coat, his jingling spurs, his sabre, his moustache, his gold lace, his shiny buttons, his smart jacket, his tall, well-knit figure, and put yourself, if you can, in poor Mary 56 CJiaring Cross to St. Pauf s Jane's place, and think what a god of her idolatry he well may be ! Think of the butcher's boy and the baker's boy who are her usual morning callers, and think how they would look beside that gorgeous soldier! Is there any corresponding womanly splendour which could equally dazzle the butcher's boy or the baker's boy ? Does any woman ever come in his way as supremely dazzling and overawing as the cavalryman is to the maiden of the kitchen ? Let us try to think. A ballet girl, perhaps, with her gauzy petticoats, and her pink legs, and her powdered and rouged face, and her smiles, and her suppleness, and her general splendour of attire ? Well, no doubt she must seem to him like some creature from another sphere. And then the circus -riding woman in the velvet bodice and the short skirts and the pretty buskins, who stands upright on the horse's back and leaps through all the crash- ing hoops, and then at intervals drops down into the saddle again with pretty pantings of fatigue and bewitching little shudders of Charing Cross 57 exhaustion ; surely she must seem a vision of youth, beauty, and spangles — a plump phantom, if there could be such a thing, of delight ? Yes, we may admit the ballet girl and the circus-riding girl ; we may admit that they must in their radiance shine as dazzlingly on the butcher's boy and the baker's boy as even the cavalryman shines upon Mary Jane. But look at the difference. Where, I should like to know, is the ballet girl or the circus-riding woman who would condescend to go out for a walk with the young butcher or baker ? He might as well expect Miss Ethel Newcome or Miss Mary Anderson to go out a-walking with him. So these divine creatures are divine indeed for him ; they are stars that shine on him from a far sky, not lamps that burn to light his lowly way. But Mary Jane walks out with her cavalryman on the Sunday, leans upon his heroic arm, looks up lovingly into his eyes, sits beside him on the bench in one of the parks, is " a part of his life," as the heroines in the novels put it. Therefore, 58 C/iarinj^- Cross to St. Pant's Mary Jane's experience with her soldier lover is an experience that, to my mind, is quite unique. Aladdin with the princess was not in i-t, if a comparison had to be made. I begin to feel sorry for all poor young princesses. They could not by any human possibility find any mortal lover so delight- fully above them in heroic splendour as INIary Jane has found in her cavalryman. Is she not on the Sunday the happiest of human beings .'' Very likely she is, but I once caught a glimpse of a face at Charing Cross one hot day of last summer which expressed a greater concentration of happiness than I had ever seen on the human countenance before, or perhaps shall ever see there again. It was a hot day — glowingly, gloriously hot. Out- side a public-house door stood the driver of a four-wheeler, his cab waiting for him. He held in one hand a pot of beer from which he had been taking a deep draught. He held the vessel sideways in his hand, and seeing that there was a good deal left he ml X Charing Cross 6 1 sl()i)|)C(l lor ;i nioniciiL to think over ihc joy of lh(! occasion and to lake, it in and become equal to it. Ilun'c lie was, ha[)i)y in the past, in tlie [)resent, in the near future. The pleasures of memory, the pleasures of hope, the pleasures of imai^ination ! Think of that first dee[), lon_o- draught! I low de- lightful in the men; memory ! That man would not a1)at(; oik; jot ol the heat ol that day lest in doin^' so he might los(i any of the joy of the deep drink. Hut then, in this present interval of delij^ht, and whik; he is allowing the witch(;ry of the first draught to gladden his veins and his s{M1S(;s, comes the knowledge that there is a still deeper draught yet awaiting his good pleasure. So he pauses in his drink, slants the pot a little, looks down tend(;rly into its dark foam- curdled ])ool, and still thrilling with the joy of the past drink, antici[)ates lh(; rapture of the drink that is soon to comc^ No, I nc^ver saw in life or in art any human face so beaming, so radiant with an all -ineffable delight, as the fac(; of that cabman on that 62 Charing Cross to St. PaiiFs hot day at Charing Cross with his porter- pot in his hand. Have we got him in any of these sketches ? No, not exactly. We have not got him ; but we have got his cab. There it stands in the sketch of the street near the Eleanor's Cross. The cab, yes ; but why not the cabman ? Can you not guess ? Why, of course, because the artist, Hke a true man of genius, recognised the fact that no mortal hand or earthly pencil could reproduce the expression of that measureless content — and the joy of the cabman's countenance, like the grief of Agamemnon's kingly face, was purposely evaded by art, and left unillustrated. Art bowed to each, sighed, and turned deliber- ately, nobly, resignedly away. Ill THE STRAND I REGRET not being a man of fortune. I am sincere in the expression of that regret. I regret the fact because among other reasons 1 am denied the luxury of studying such streets as the Strand from the summit of an omnibus. A man whose time is his only money cannot afford so costly a joy. The top of the omnibus is the seat for the idle — for those to whom time is a thing to be killed like game, or for the hard-worked and poor, whose hours after work is done are, in the money sense, valueless. But a man like my- self may not afford omnibuses. He must take the frequent hansom. If he goes about much he lives half his life in hansoms. He has 64 Charing Cross to St. Paur s to do it. It would not be satisfactory to save a few shillings by taking omnibuses, and as a reward for his economy have to put up with the loss of a few guineas. I have not been on the top of an omnibus for years and years, but I have many pleasant memo- ries of long, delightful journeys thus made^ in days when all the world was younger, and seemed to me to be a good deal less in a hurry, I gaze with envy on the people who sit enthroned on the roof of the penny omnibus in Mr. Pennell's lively sketch. How characteristic are the faces of these people ! See the rather pretty young woman with her veil drawn midway down her nose, and the foreign gentleman, with the moustache and the eyeglasses, and the self-assertive hat. And look at the elderly woman inside the 'bus. I should like to be on the top of that omnibus and to go whithersoever it went, and then to come back w^ith it again. I used to love that sort of thing when I was a very vouno; man studvino^ London as a stranger — the only way in which London is really to The Strand 65 be studied. It used to be a favourite way of mine to hail the first omnibus I saw and scramble on to the roof, which was a feat of gymnastics in those days — we had no spiral staircases to our omnibuses then — a feat no woman ever ventured to accomplish, or even attempt — and let it carry me whither it would. I well knew that it could not carry me to any region or any street which would not be full of interest for me. I should like to make some expeditions of that kind even now, and survey the streets and the crowds, and call up recollections of other such rides long ago, and revive reminiscences in every place. I knew, long ago, of two brothers, young lads, in a seaport town in one of these islands, who in all their love of the river and the sea, and their boat and the broken waves, still yearned above all things to see London. London was to them simply the London of Shakespeare and of Dickens and Thackeray. They used to spend hours in picturing to themselves the delights of living in London. 66 C/iariiio- Cross to St. J\n(/'s O They proposed to live in some pretty suburb, and to go to town every morning and re- turn every evening on the top of an omnibus. This was their modest idea of life ; they did not stop to think oi' any particular quarter of London as more desirable to live in than another ; the point of the thing was the fact of their living in London, and in that sense being the owners of it — able to go about it and study it and be happy in it. It was a sort oi' London mania which was very con- tagious in those days among boys who had never been in London, and it got its chief impulse from Dickens. The elder of the boys came to London and settled there, and has been living there a great many years, and of course sees little or nothing of London now. The younger lad never saw London at all. He went out to the Lhiited States to make a fortune, with the express intention of returning to Europe and living in London. He never returned. The Civil War broke out, and although he never was wounded, yet in the damp night-watches and in the tM,^, :> ^^^^^^4^:-^i}51?^:.^/^ ^ iff" I 11 w^ IN T/IK STKANI) The Strand 69 intrenchments the seeds were sown of the disease of which he died. And so he never saw London — never once. And I, passing through London this way and that, and wholly without noticing the streets and houses, suddenly happen to remember these old-time fancyings and aspirations, and to see him. There are a good many ghosts about the Strand that the Strand never sees. The longer one lives in London, the more the Strand comes to be a phantom-haunted thoroughfare. Now, take the region which Mr. Pennell has chosen to picture in the sketch I have already mentioned — the sketch which brings in the penny omnibus. It is in the close neighbourhood of Somerset House. To me that part of the Strand is haunted by many ghosts — "the forms that men spy with the half-shut eye." Some memories of a vanished Bohemia of literature and art haunt me as I look on Mr. Pennell's sketch. Do I not remember a gifted, eccentric Bohemian who used to haunt a restaurant on the left side of 70 Charing Cross to St, PaitVs the Strand as you go eastward to St. Paul's, and almost exactly opposite to the spot where Mr. Pennell's policeman checks the too reck- less advance of one of J\Ir. Pennell's life-like, livinof hansom cabs ? Do I not remember the account he used to give of his effort to find "a basis of operations" for the livelihood of the day } When he had twopence he was ready to start. He made for this particular restaurant, and he ordered a cup of coffee. One could get a cup of coffee for twopence in those days — can one now ? I do not know ; I do not drink coffee. There he had his basis of operations. He lingered over his coffee until some Bohemian friend lounged in, who, seeing him, invited him to have a drink. My hero declined, was pressed, declined again, and then compromised by saying he didn't mind accepting a veal-and- ham pie. So there he is started. With a veal-and-ham pie and a cup of coffee, a man who can digest such food is prepared to begin the world. Then, later on, another friend drops in, and our hero is now suffi- THE STRAND The Strand 7^ ciently fortified to accept a pint of half-and- half. Then he starts out in pursuit of work. He drops in upon editors and sub-editors, he pays a visit to publishers ; perhaps he gets an order for some job of literary work — perhaps he even gets payment for some job already done — and then he goes to his rooms, or his room, wherever the location may be, and if he has work to do he does it, and if he has had a cheque he goes back with a light heart to the restaurant I have described and he orders a dinner, and if any of his friends be round, he stands a dinner bravely, and so pays off the frequent veal-and-ham pies and the pints of half-and-half, and he is started in the world once again. It will not matter if for another week he is impecunious, he will not be as Dr. Johnson subscribed himself, " Impransus" — he will not be in the condition of wanting a dinner. Only he must have his basis of operations to b(!gin with — he has his code of honour like another. He will not go into that favourite haunt without the means of calling for something 74 Charing Cross to St. PaitT s at once and of paying for it on the nail. With that to begin with he is safe. I think with a genuine pleasure that it was my happy chance on more than one occasion to advance the modest sum which enabled him fairly to enter the day's battle of life. He was a man of principle : he never sought to borrow more ...an was needed to lay down the basis of operations. He is dead long since. Earth lie light upon his grave — that is, if he cares whether it lies light or heavy. He made life lie more lightly than it otherwise might have done for many of us in those far-oft days when the Strand was yet a wilderness of possibilities, a garden of romance, a battle- field from which one mio^ht come back a conquering hero, or on which one might, like my poor friend, "yield his broken sword to Fate the Conqueror." I do not suppose that sort of bitter struggle for life goes on now among the younger men who are fight- ing their way into London literature. I hope not. There are so many more news- papers and magazines of all kinds that fair The Strand 75 employment ought to be got much more easily now than it was then. I am glad if all the old irregular days of literature are gone. I am entirely in favour of regularity and order ; but it must be owned that the gipsy is artistically a much more interesting personage than the beadle, or even • ::he policeman. " Hallo, my fancy ! whither wilt thou go ? " I have been wandering away from Mr. Pennell's sketches of to-day's London into a London of I do not want to say how many years ago. Anyhow, it was a London when Thackeray, and Dickens, and Mark Lemon, and John Leech, and Shirley Brooks, and Leicester Buckingham, and Edward Whitty were still alive. But although one ought to keep to the Strand of the present, one cannot do it if he has any memories. The real and the unreal, the present and the past, get so mixed up that they cannot be kept asunder. Why, there is not a house, not a shop, we pass on our way eastward from Charing Cross to St, Paul's, 76 Charing Cross to St. Panl's that has not a story and an association for me — a story and an association connected with some individuality of man or woman to which I could put a name. Stop me at any house you please on either side of the Strand, and I shall have something to tell you associated with that particular house and none other. Perhaps I have never crossed its threshold : what does that matter ? I met some one, saw some one pass, just outside that shop ; some great man, perhaps, whose face I then looked on for the first time, and do you think I could ever forget that shop ? See ! from the windows of that house near Exeter Hall I saw Kossuth go by — saw that serene, majestic face, then one of the handsomest faces one could look on — saw him go by with the adoring crowd about him. He was indeed the lion of a season then — Kossuth then, Stanley the other day — and in between how many and in what a strange succession ! The Emperor of the French one day, and Garibaldi another, and the Shah, and the Czar, and Buffalo KXETEK HALL The Strand 79 Bill ! Not a spot along the whole length of the Strand but I associate it with some name and face of a passing celebrity. Just there, at the spot where Wellington Street touches the south side of the Strand, I saw Dickens for the last time. They have a saying in New York that if you take your stand on a certain part of Broadway, you will see everybody you want to see. The same thing might have been said, and much more aptly, of the Strand at one time. Perhaps it is not quite the same now. Westward the course of celebrity takes its way. Exeter Hall ! I have mentioned Exeter Hall, and here is the place itself as shown by Mr. Pennell. Exeter Hall is an institu- tion ; it has a history ; its history ought to be written, I think the book would take — "The History of Exeter Hall." Forty years must have gone by since Macaulay roused a storm of anger against him by his famous allusion to "the bray of Exeter Hall." That was in the time when Exeter 8o C/iariiig Cross to St. Pants Hall was associating itself mainly with move- ments against the Pope and the Jesuits, and against the political emancipation of the Jews. But Exeter Hall, apart from questions of creed altogether, has been the nursery of many a noble agitation in a good cause. The first time I ever heard Mr. Henry Ward Beecher speak was at a meeting in Exeter Hall. It was while the Civil W^ar was ooino- on in America, and he had come over to plead the cause of the North. The meeting was got up by the friends of the North, but the Southern cause was very popular in London society then, and there were numbers of the advocates of the South in the hall that nioht. Beecher's speech was rudel)-, and even savagely, interrupted in the beginning, but before long he made his opponents listen to him. I think Beecher was the most dexterous and powerful platform speaker I ever listened to, and that night he was put upon his mettle. His self-possession was superb; his good-humour unconquerable ; his voice /-v-r-3.'^."--,^, I , t'- 'I few ■:-mM TKKKV S -I'lIKA IKK G The Strand 83 splendid ; his readiness of reply was as the ex- plosion following the spark. He was making some allusion to religion in the North, when some one sarcastically called out, " Religion and war ! " meaning to imply thereby, no doubt, that religious nations do not carry on war. Beecher caught at the interruption. "Religion and war,'*" he exclaimed; "and what is the national emblem borne by the flag of England ? Is it not the cross upon the field of blood?" At that time there was felt some dissatisfaction in England about an over- enthusiastic welcome given to certain Russian princes in the United States. We were then full of horror at the suppression of the Polish rebellion, and we hated the Russians. A voice called out during one of Beecher's thrilling sentences, "What about the Russians?" Beecher understood the meaning of the question, and he gave it a prompt reply. " I suppose," he said in a grave, deep tone, "you mean to condemn some of our great folks in my country because they seem to be coquetting 84 Charing Cross to St. PanF s with the Russians who enslave the Poles ? You are grieved that they should do so. Well, so am I ; and you will all the better understand how grieved we feel when your great folks coquette with the Southerners who enslave the negroes." The reply was all the more effective because it assumed the perfect good faith of the interruption, and admitted a sympathy with its purpose. How well Mr. Pennell has rendered the austere aspect of Exeter Hall ! No doubt he draws every scene exactly as he sees it and finds it — but if we did not know this we might be inclined to believe that he had exercised a little poetic fancy in making the very passers-by applicable in appearance to the character and the associations of the building. Observe the man with the strictly sleek hat and the shaven face and the eye- glass, looking indeed in some ways a good deal like a certain distinguished statesman and debater who has lately been occupying a very prominent and peculiar position. But this gentleman in the street picture, how The Strand 85 entirely in harmony he is with the aspect of Exeter Hall ! He is so primly well dressed, so very sedate and proper. And the cab- men, one this way, two that, drive slowly by as if they were passing a church during service-time. Contrast that scene with the look of the little crowd round the Gaiety, where, as we see, "Faust up to Date" was still going on. To be sure this latter crowd is a crowd attracted by " Faust up to Date " — it is a Gaiety crowd altogether. Where the Gaiety door is, there will the Johnnies and chappies be. But the Exeter Hall scene is a happy accident, for there does not seem to be any meeting going on just then inside, and the chance of street traffic enabled the artist to make the whole sketch a piece of harmony. It is worth while to notice the different appearance and manner of two men who are passing the door of the Gaiety, but do not belong to the crowd. They are much more in the foreground : of one we see only the head and shoulders. He is well dressed, but there is something 86 Charing Cross to St. PaiiVs distinctly provincial about him. He turns to look at the crowd with interest and sym- »iillr''j l'J■WJJtJM^»'^"«^(^^''* ^ '^' '"^ *»"' ^' '** »»(i«tn«''«i(it>wili«*k ':~^A,^|)ll^ll Mm M ^" ^> THIC GAIKTY pathy. He is not going in himself; he has .J' some appointment which takes him else- where ; but he would go in if he could. Yet he is not in any disappointed mood. I am The Strand 87 sure he likes well to _i;o where he is going, and does not envy those who have places in the Gaiety. Only he is a distinct sym[)athiser — he has been there before, and is sure to go again some night before he leaves town. But now look at the man with the soft felt hat, the close-cropped hair, and the mous- tache and beard. He goes grimly, morosely on, and never turns one glance on the frivolous little crowd round the Gaiety door. His mood is not in sympathy with such doings. He holds his mouth firmly shut ; he looks straight before him in a dogged sort of way. Who is he, and what is the matter with him.'* Is he an artisan of the better class on strike ^. Is he a conspirator ? Is he a man of naturally stern mood who hates amusement of all kind } I rather lean to the theory of the conspirator. He is one of some foreign fraternity, and something is in preparation about which he has no great hope, and he passes along the Strand brood- ing over it, and does not even know that there is a crowd of pleasure-seekers obstruct- 88 Charing Cross to St. Paufs ing a part of the pavement. He moves along as unnoticed by them as his purpose is unknown to them. He and the young man from the country will pass each other closely in another second or two, but they have no more to do with each other than two ships that pass wide-parted on the ocean. One could spin a little story out of almost every figure in these sketches — ^just as one could out of almost each separate figure in the actual life of the Strand. Because the artist has made each of his figures so full of life, so living, and where there is life there is story, as surely as where there is substance there also is shadow. But whether the life be the substance and the story the shadow, or the story the substance and the life only the poor shadow, I do not venture to say. It would carry one too far away to try to work out that problem. There is a figure, for instance, in the sketch which contains the omnibus — a figure ready-made for a story. It is the fioure of a man who is crossinQf to the north side of the Strand, close to where VVKLI.INGTUN .Vi KKK 1 The Strand 91 the policeman checks the cab. There is a keen, cold March wind blowing ; you can see that it is so by the manner in which the man keeps his hands deep set in his pockets, and by the shuddering outlines of his gaunt figure. He is very poorly dressed — those trousers and those boots speak eloquently, far too eloquently, the tale of " Hard-up." The whole sketch is only a few black touches, but we get the man complete and living, and we can easily find out his story. He has seen better days. He started in life well, but indolence first and misfortune after told against him, and he was never a man to fight stoutly against enemies, and if Fate stared hard into his face to stare sternly back at her — and so he succumbed and went down and down. Fate is very cowardly ; she delights to inflict chastisement on those who readily submit to her ; and on the ill- booted heels of this poor man "unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster." There was a girl once who loved him, shabby poor rascal as he looks now — she 92 Charing Cross to St. PaiLls loved him and would have risked her happi- ness with him, but he had no ambition and he had no real courage, and she saw all this, and turned away disappointed — and she is happily married now, and only sometimes remembers the good-for-nothing lover of former days — the man with the old boots and with his hands in his pockets. See, even against the March wind he has not the courage to stand up stiff and defiant. He cowers and cringes before it as he cowered and cringed before other antagonists, and this is what he has come to. Let him pass ; let us not follow him to his lonely home : no one could do any good for him ever again. We get more than one impression of the Lyceum in these sketches. We see it by day- light, we see it by lamplight. The Lyceum, like Exeter Hall, is an institution, only of a different kind, and ought to have its history. My first recollection of the Lyceum goes back to the days of Charles Mathews and Madame Vestris. I was new to London then, and I had never seen such actino- as that of Charles THI-: LYCEUM The Strand 95 Mathews. I have seen a good many actors In a good many countries since that time, but I have never seen any one who could surpass Charles Mathews in light comedy. He holds in my recollection a place absolutely distinct, apart, entirely to himself. However, 1 am now discoursing not of Charles Mathews ex- clusively, but only of Charles Mathews as a figure in the history of the Lyceum, Then there comes a blank in my memory for some years, and Charles Mathews has ceased to be associated with the Lyceum, and all London that cares about acting at all is rushing to the Lyceum to see another Charles — Charles Fechter — act in " Ruy Bias." What a sen- sation that was ! " Yesterday I was your servant; to-day I am your executioner!" How the pit rose at these words, and the magnificent gesture which gave effect to them ! The Lyceum then fairly conquered Fashion. For at that time Fashion in London had given up going to what we call "the theatre," in the ordinary sense, and only professed to go to the Opera. But 96 Charing Cross to St. Paulas Fechter, with his success, seized the heads of Fashion's horses, and turned the carriage round, and compelled it to land its master and mistress at the doors of the Lyceum Theatre. Then came "The Duke's Motto," which delighted Fashion even more than " Ruy Bias " had done. The unspeakably p^allant and o-raceful bearinQ- of the hero when he was playing his own part ; the marvellous subtlety and craft when he was playing the part of the hunchback ; the exquisite grace of Kate Terry, then in all the brightness and freshness of youth ; the winning archness of Carlotta Leclercq, and the brilliant closing scene, "ringed with a flame of fair faces and splendid with swords," all this charmed the town with a new and delightful sensation. Then came the " Hamlet" over which there was so much controversy — the Hamlet of Delaroche, the Hamlet of Goethe, the Hamlet of the flaxen locks. That was the zenith of Fechter's fame ; the rest was Q-radual descent. The last time I saw Fechter was at a dinner of the " Saturday Club " in The Strand 97 Boston, Massachusetts. Members of the club were allowed on certain clays to intro- duce each a guest to the dinner ; Fechter was the guest of Longfellow, I of Emerson. Wendell Holmes was there. But I am wandering away from the Lyceum. Years go on, and there is another Hamlet in possession of the Lyceum, with another Miss Terry for the fair Ophelia ; and Irving, too, has conquered Fashion, and made it a captive at the wheels of his chariot. For a while he disappears — is off to America to become the star of the New World theatres, and Mary Anderson makes her first appear- ance at the Lyceum, and bewitches her audience with Parthenia. She is timid at first, and speaks in a low tone. " A little louder, Mary ! " a voice cries out from the back of the gallery ; and Mary smiles at the well- meant familiarity of the interruption, and she speaks a little louder, and she has scored a new success for the Lyceum. Yet a little, and the Lyceum welcomes with all its accla- mations the almost perfect Daly Company, H 98 Charing Cross to St. PauTs with its superb actress and great artist, Miss Ada Rehan, and we all acknowledge with ready rapture that " this is the Shrew whoni Shakespeare drew." Yes, the Lyceum has a splendid record in the history of the stage. It has been a sort of academy of dramatic art. Its pupils and students go out and teach the world. The picture-shops and the photographers' used to be the delight of my early days, and indeed I stop every now and then even still to affichcr myself to some winning window. There is one shop — should I call it a shop ? — is not that word far too lowly in its import for the establishment I speak of? — with which I have certain tender associations. Some seventeen or eighteen years ago I was look- ing in at its windows one day, and a story about it came into my mind. I had long- been in the habit of studying its windows. It stands at the corner of one of the streets run- ning off the Strand — but not for worlds would I make known the name of the street at the corner of which it stands — and it exhibits rich store of pictures, statues, statuettes, and curi- BUKLEIGII STKEET, STKANU L.ot u The Strand loi osities — silver, gold, bronze, and all sorts of delightful things. I never was near the place but I went to the windows and studied them. And I got into my mind — it came on me quite suddenly one day — a story about it. How if it should happen to be owned by a man — I do not know to this day who owns it — who had two pretty daughters, and whose highest ambition in life was to have them, or one of them, married into rank '^. He had the repute of having plenty of money, and indeed lent, in a private and confidential and per- fectly honourable way, money on the fairest terms to embarrassed gentlemen who were known to him as clients. And everything goes wrong for a while, and everything comes right in the end — and I shall not tell my story all over again : this is not an advertise- ment. Only I am inclined to point out the curious relationship in which a certain house may stand to a writer of fiction — a house which, he knows not how, has inspired him with a subject. In that house are dwelling for him beings whom the owner of the house I02 Charing Cross to St. PaiiTs has never met and knows nothing of. I never pass that house but I see my heroine and her shadowy kith and kin, and her lover — and all the rest of them — and the owner of the house, I daresay, never heard of my heroine — and for that matter never heard of me — and I know nothing about him or his family. I only know that I have installed there for myself another family whose names do not appear upon any rate-books, and no member of which ever records a vote at the parliamentary elections for the Strand Division of London. There is another street running off the Strand in the same neighbourhood, a street also running to the river, in which is a house wherein lived one of the heroes of my fiction. There is a set of tiny chambers in Agar Street, off the Strand, about which I dreamed a melancholy little story. It is hard for a somewhat dreamy personage like myself to take the Strand quite seriously. One has made it so unreal — one has hashed up in such inextricable confusion the real and the unreal. The scent that comes from Rimmel's shop The Strand lo brings back all youth to me. Why ? Simply because I used to look into Rimmel's windows and inhale their scents when I was a very young man. Nothing carries with it a richer association than the breath of some scent. It is like magic. Music itself — which is magic — can hardly equal it. You are wander- ing along the streets thinking of nothing — along the Strand — you are moving through just such a crowd as our artist sets living before us — and you are utterly commonplace. And suddenly some breath of perfume is borne in upon you — from a flower-girl's roses, or even from the made-up contents of Rim- mel's window-cases — and behold ! one is living all at once in another and an enchanted world — the world one lived in or fancied he was living in years and years ago. Once, not long since, I was passing down the Strand, and there were some repairs going on — and I caught the odour of a pitch-kettle — and in a moment I was back to the seaport home of my boyhood again, and to the sound of the breaking waves. IV THE STRAND (i'Ollf iuiicd) TiiKKK arc a few dcliohtful old houses slill to o be seen at rare intervals on either side of the Strand. They are the old houses with the overshot windows, which suggest the days of Chaucer. Some of them may be seen in Mr. Pennell's sketch of the little crowds looking in at the windows in the near neigh- bourhood of the Strand Theatre. These sacred old-time houses are fast disappearing. Soon they will have gone altogether. Every lover of poetry and history and art, of what- ever kind, ought to be sorry when these houses and their memories are gone. 1 find no fault with the spick-and-span new red- brick houses, ever so much more Queen- Tine STKANI), liV SdMl'.USKT IIOUSK The Strand 107 Anne-like than the houses of Queen Anne's own day. Many of these new houses are very beautiful buildings, and where there are whole streets of them the streets are, happily, not allowed to be monotonous. The archi- tects who delighted in such creations as the Quadrant in Regent Street are not in practice now. I should not feel much regret if the revival of Queen Anne architecture were to mean the pulling down and obliterating all remains of the hideous Georgian houses, with their formal, commonplace monotony. But one must lament for the few really old houses — for the fewer still that are left of the dear, delightful old hostelries. Is there no way of preserving even a few of these old buildings, in order that a future generation may be able quite to understand what Chaucer is talking about sometimes } Could they not be kept up as national monuments '^ I often wonder that somebody in the United States does not offer to buy some of them, and take them over — stone by stone, brick by brick, rafter by rafter — and set them up io8 Charing Cross to St. Paiirs again, all standing, in Central Park, New York, or on Boston Common. I wish some American would make the offer and trans- plant the houses. For over there they would be admired and preserved, but if left to us they are sure to vanish. You can see them better in Mr. Pennell's sketch than you can in the street. In the sketch you can study them at your leisure, and as long as you like ; in the Strand you are hustled along by the crowd, and you can only get a good look at them even for the moment by crossing to the other side of the street. How oddly they contrast with the new houses, some of which are their near neighbours— with the red bricks and the tiles, and the prison-bar-like windows, and the doors set deep in cells, and all the other old -new ornamentations of architecture ! What will some future genera- tion think of this general revival of the age of Queen Anne — this deliberate architectural masquerade and fancy-dress exposition ? Goethe somewhere said it was well enough to wear fancy dress and become a Turk or a The Strand 109 Venetian senator for part of a night, but he could not understand being a sham Turk or Venetian senator for one's whole long life- time. Yet there are people, undoubtedly, who do go through their whole lives thus masquerading — putting on the airs of some- thing they are not, and never were, and never can be. Are we not doing something of the same kind with our streets and our houses ? But the more we carry on this architectural renaissance, the more fondly do I wish we could preserve such of our ancient houses as are still upreared among us. Let us, if possible, have some of the real old time to console us for the unreality of the sham old time. London was real once. Why allow every evidence of the reality to be effaced ^ Then there comes another thought. Queen Anne revived will, of course, only have her day. Even a ghost cannot live for ever. Men will grow tired of the red-brick houses and the Queen Anneism. They will want something else. In some far-off genera- no Charing Cross to St. PanTs tion is it not possible that a fancy might come up for the revival of Queen Victorianism in street architecture ? All very well, but what will there be to revive ? The aofe of Oueen Victoria has not any architecture of its own. It inherited the hideous remains of the Georgian times, and it came in for the restoration of Queen Anne. If the latter movement goes on much further it will soon have obliterated every trace of the London which Queen Victoria looked on when she went forth to her coronation, or paid her first visit to the House of Lords. To be sure there is what may perhaps be described as the Pimlico order of architecture — the stucco- faced house with its ridiculous attempt at a Greek porch, which house, multiplied by many and divided into two lines, constitutes a Pimlico or "South Belgravia " street. Nothing else in the way of street building ever was half so hideous. The worst of the Georgian streets is like Venice, or Nuremberg, or Oxford, by comparison. It gives one a sinking of the heart to look down the ruthless " r The Strand 1 1 3 monotony of a Pimlico street, with every house exactly the same size and shape as every other, and not a tree to refresh the saddened, sickened eyes. But let us hope that revived Queen Anne may be remorseless, and, like the jaws of darkness, devour up these dreadful structures, and leave it to be said in history that in Queen Victoria's age men did not build ; they only revived. In the meantime we are in the Strand, and not in Pimlico — for which give praise. The sight of one of the windows in these Chaucerian houses revives the spirits. The prettiest associations curl, and twine, and play about it, like ivy or like smoke. One can see some winsome girl peep out of that window to look at her lover riding by, as he goes westward to attend the Kinf{. The Kinof, of course, is Edward the Third. Why should not the lover be Chaucer himself, in the days of his early courtiership, and his early court- ship '^ Why should not the girl looking out from the window be Philippa herself — the Philippa whom he afterwards married — in the I 1 1 4 CJiaring Cross to St. PauTs days before he went soldiering and was taken captive, and got home again, and was made Comptroller of the Customs at the port of London? Yes, Philippa it is, Philippa it shall be, who looks down from her overshot lattice window and sees her courtly, gallant lover ride by ; and he waves his plumed cap to her, and makes his horse caracole just a little to show what he can do in the way of horsemanship, to make her start first and smile afterwards. Somerset House, as we go along, dispels the poetic illusions — for even Old Somerset House, if we could see it, would be far too modern for any association with Chaucerian times, and the Somerset House we look on is a thing of the day before yesterday. Look at the ragged woman selling, or trying to sell, her newspapers containing the " result of the Grand National." There are face and figure to bid the poetic begone and the hard, grim realistic take its place. There is the nineteenth -century struggle for life brouoht down to its meanest, its saddest. Mr. Pennell has done well to fix that figure The Strand 1 1 5 on the mind and memory. England's national prestige, the glory of the empire on which the sun never sets — yes, it is s])lendid to think of that greatness and that glory — but just look there, look at that old woman ! How many hundreds of thousands of her, how many millions of her, I wonder, are there in these two islands ? Some day we shall have to put the big politics, the grand politics, the grandiose politics aside for a litde, and take account of her. Now let us buy her paper ; that is about all one can do for her. I do not myself know what the Grand National is, but let us buy a paper for the sake of that poor, ragged old woman, who is certainly national enough in her way, but about whom there is not much of grandeur anyhow. The sun which never sets on imperial glory has set long since on this poor old daughter of England. Somehow, I don't know how, I cannot think but that her con- dition dims the lustre of imperial glory. I always feel greatly interested in these street figures, as one might call them — these in- 1 1 6 Charing Cross to Si. PauCs habitants of the streets, these poor things, young and old, who make a hving in the streets — to whom the pavement of the Strand is their Stock Exchange, their mart, their Royal Academy Exhibition, their court of law, the stage of their theatre — the flower-girls, the boys who scrape up refuse, the men who sell cheap toys, the men who have stands for the sale of photographs. Now the inventions of science promise by degrees to knock away all their chances of making a living, such as it is, out of the passing crowds on the Strand. We shall stand before a machine, we shall drop a penny and take our chance of a photo- graph — it may be Cardinal Manning or it may be Miss Nellie Farren ; or when some public personage is monopolising attention it may be that he will have a machine all to himself, and that we shall drop in our penny and take out our photograph of Mr. Stanley. All the same the wandering photograph-seller who lives up and down the Strand will find his poor little business taken clean out of his hands. No doubt we shall have some invention for the The Strand i 1 7 sale of flowers in the same way, and the cheap toys will be sold off by process of machinery, and there will be a company started for the mechanical collection of street refuse, and even the sellers of the evening editions of the newspapers will find their occupation gone from them. I have often wondered, by the way, why London does not have any street stalls for the sale of newspapers and magazines and cheap books, as the great American cities have. You never need want for a newspaper in a great American city. You have only to keep on a little and you will soon come to a goodly stall on the side -walk, covered up with newspapers, and magazines, and cheap books — ^just, in fact, what you only see at a railway station here. I know what a business it is to get a particular newspaper if you are in the House of Commons and the House does not happen to take that particular news- paper in. You would have to send miles to the newspaper office. I have sometimes crossed to the Westminster Bridge railway station and asked for permission to go on to 1 1 8 C/itirino Cross to St. Pau/s the platform and hunt up the paper there. But if our Parliamentary buildings were managed after the fashion of Washington, one wouKl only have to pass out into Westminster 1 1 all to find a capacious bookstall, loaded with all tlie journalistic and literary delicacies of the season. 1 do not, somehow, see the great superiority of our system. Hut in truth we are only beginning to be a newspaper- reading peo[ile. We are even yet ever so far behind the people o{ the United States and the Canadians in that way. and even the people of New \ i^'k tlo ncn. 1 think, come near the people o{ tin\ little Alliens in the passion for the devouring of newspapers. Whv, the Square of the Constitution after the i'irf\''s have closed looks as if it were covered with snow, owing to the mass of [xi[HM-s King about that men have read and thrcnvn awav. 1 lu^ \ iennese, too. area news- paper-reading population, and so of course are the Parisians. Put the Parisians do not touch upon the New Yorkers, nor the New Yorkers upon the Athenians. We Londoners are /ehiii^ , ST. MAKV-I.I'-.-STUANI) The Strand 121 pretty low down so far. For inventive energy I think, however, our newspaper-seHing boys and men miofht hold their own against most of their brothers in the trade. The New York newsboy is an astounding little fellow, with his indomitable energy, and his unweary- ing good spirits, and his quenchless eagerness for trade ; but I do not think he allows him- self to invent much. I remember being stopped once in a cab, as I was driving home from a theatre on the Strand, by a boy selling newspapers, who implored me to buy the latest edition, containing the full account of the shooting of Mr. Parnell that evening by Mr. Charles Bradlaugh. I did not purchase, and the event was not recorded in the morn- ing journals of the following day. Near the old houses in the Strand Mr. Pennell has given us a characteristic figure. It is that of a man with a great bloated face, and a pipe in his mouth. Probably it is only the human countenance that could be so completely divorced from all shade of expres- sion. No doubt the man is enjoying his 122 Charing Cross to St. Paul's pipe, but his face betrays no gleam of deliorht which mioht c^ive us the satisfaction of knowing that a human creature is happy. He seems to be of the costermonger class, and the costermonger, I should fancy, con- trives to get a good deal of a rough practical sort of enjoyment out of life. But this man is all stolidity. He sucks his pipe and pushes his way, and seems to have no concern with emotion of any kind. This is a face one sees very often in London. One does not see it so often, or often at all, in the great provincial cities, such as Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow — one does not see it at all, I think, in Paris or in New York. In Paris one sees many faces sullen, scowlinQ-, and discontented — men with old and new revolutions gleaming in their fierce eyes. But the face of actual and complete stolidity is to be found in its best specimens in London. I wonder whether that man with the pipe ever thinks of anything ? When he goes home at night after his day's work does he ever review The Strand 12 life at all, and take into account how much it is worth to him ? Or does the pipe supply the place of all the futile thought and hope- less self-scrutiny wherewith most others of us mortals are wont to perplex ourselves by way of recreation ? Would that man do a noble action if it came in his way to do it, or would he, under like conditions, commit a crime ? I am almost inclined to think that he could not do a noble action or commit a crime, because nothing would be a noble action or a crime to him. The thing would not present itself to him in that light. If he did a good deed it would not be because he thought it good, or thought about it at all ; if he committed a crime it would only be as the machine at the railway station gives out its packet of butterscotch or its cigarette. I do not think the study of that face makes one quite ex- ultant about the blessings of civilisation in London. It must be curious — if one could get to the inside of it — the life of a man who never reflects. We know what an I 24 Charing Cross to St. PaiiTs inferior and good-for-nothing creature is the man who never to himself has said that this, whatever it might be, is his own, his native land. But this man with the pipe probably never said anything to himself about his native land — it probably never came into his mind that he had a native land, and he would not have troubled himself to care about the fact even if he recognised its existence. Has he even a vaeue dislike somehow and some- where to the French or the Russians — or the Irish, maybe ? — I hardly think so. I can hardly believe he has reasoned himself far enough to get up any such emotion. I have sometimes been amused, when having to wander about obscure parts of London, to find how many people there are who do not know the name of the street in which they themselves are living. They have hired their poor little lodging, and perhaps have occupied the same lodging for a long time — in many trades and quarters the populations are not at all nomad — and they know where their home is, and can find it every night ST. MARY-LE-S-IRAND FROM THK EAST The Strand 127 without a mistaken ; and what more should they want to know about it ? What does it matter to them by what name somebody has chosen to call the street? It is their street — the street in which they live — and that is enough and to spare for them. I am inclined to believe that this man with the pipe never asked himself or any one else the name of the street in which he lives. Near Somerset House a man is crossing the Strand. He wears a double eye-glass, through which he is peering as he crosses, apparently looking for some name or number on a shop. He has a full beard and mous- tache, and a handsome, well -moulded face. He has left middle aoe a little behind — he is making towards sixty — but there is a freshness, there is an elasticity about him which still carries with it a perfume and a savour as of youth. I think he takes life now pretty much as he finds it. He has thought out most questions as far as he could, and then at last come to the conclusion that it would be better to let them think 128 Charing Cross to St. Paiirs themselves out without any trouble on his part. He belongs to one of the artistic professions, I am sure. I should be inclined to set him down as a genial literary or dramatic critic. He has written books and plays in his time, and they were good in their way, and had a certain sort of success ; but they were not good enough for him. He recognised the fact that he had not the sacred fire of genius in him, and he did not care for mere respectability in literature or the drama. So he gave up creative work of any kind, and took to journalism — to criticism, and what are called "society leaders," and, indeed, leaders on all manner of light and bright subjects. He is really an admirable critic, because he Is intensely sympathetic. He approaches every book or play he criticises with a sincere desire to find some- thing good in it. If he really cannot say anything good of it he would much rather say nothing at all about it. But when, as in the case of a play, for example, he can- not let it pass unnoticed, then he gives his The Strand i^i opinion, gently indeed, but very firmly ; and those who know him, and who have not seen the play, put the criticism down when they have read it with the firm conviction that that play will not hold the stage for long. Pretensions of any kind make him angry, and he hates to be sought out and done homage to by certain authors and actors who only court him because they want to get him to notice them and to praise them. He lives mainly in the Garrick Club, and he is a great favourite there, as indeed he is where- ever he is known. He is fond of talking about Thackeray, whom he knew, and it may be that some of the younger members of the Club think he talks a little too much about Thackeray, whom they did not know. There is a story about his having been much in love in his early — indeed, not very early — days with a woman who first was of opinion that she loved him, and then became of the opinion that she loved somebody else, and married that somebody accordingly. She was not happy with the somebody, and the Charing Cross to St. Pauls somebody died, after having led her a hard Hfe for many years. Then most people thought our friend the critic would marry her, but he did not. Perhaps he thought he could not trust his " fause true-love" any more. Perhaps he had settled down to his own free and comfortable bachelor life. Perhaps he had grown out of all poetry and sentiment : but that does not seem likely. Anyhow, there he is, going off to the Garrick very likely, and he will dine there, and go from there and look in upon a theatre or two. Later he will get back to the Garrick, and will meet Mr. Irving there, and Mr. Bancroft, and Mr. Beerbohm Tree, and Mr. Harry Furniss, and that most polished of orators and brightest of wits, Mr. David Plunket, and "Joe" Knight and Comyns Carr, and ever so many more delightful companions. I have spoken of anecdotes about Thackeray, and acknowledged the fact that younger men sometimes think the subject wellnigh exhausted. Still, with that know- ledge full in my mind, let me tell a little The Strand 133 anecdote of my own about 1 liackeray and the Garrick Club. Many years ago 1 was invited to dine at the Garrick by a man well known about town in those days. He was a man of some means, and " by way of being " a literary man, and he had the reputation of being somewhat of a snob in Thackeray's sense of the word. That evening he began talking to me about Thackeray, and saying, as many people were fond of saying at the time, that Thackeray was a more complete snob than anybody pictured in his own book. I knew little of Thackeray personally, but I did not believe then, and I do not believe now, the accusation of snobbery made against him. So I disputed my friend's assertion. Whereupon he proceeded to give me evidence. "Why, in this very room," he said, " Thackeray came to me yesterday and offered me a cigar, and accompanied his offer with the words, ' Yoit ought to think highly of that cigar, for it was given me by a noble marquis.'" Yes, the story is perfectly true, and my friend did not see in the least that 134 Charing Cross to St. Paul's Thackeray was chaffing him ; was perhaps a little too open in his allusion to my friend's supposed personal weakness — his too tender devotion to the aristocracy of Great Britain. My friend never knew, I venture to think, why I smiled so much at his interesting anecdote. There, I have told my Thackeray story, and do not intend to tell any other. "We don't talk of Nathaniel Hawthorne any more," a literary man said to me not very long ago in Boston. New men come up and must have their turn. *' Marry and amen," as Browning would say. By the way, the motto of some popular edition of Browning- might well be found in the passage to which these words belong. They are, if I remem- ber rightly, in the prelude to The Ring and the Book. The poet has addressed the British public, "Ye who love me not," and then a little later on come the words, " Oh, British public, who may love me yet — marry and amen ! " The time has arrived ; the British public does love him at last. In my early London days there used to ST. CLliMKNT DANES The Strand 137 be talk of a haunted house in — where does the reader think ?— why, in Norfolk Street, Strand. What an idea ! A ghost in that prosaic region of the absolutely common- place ! Yes, the ghost was talked about, and it was said to be attached to a lodging- house, which was falling into decay accord- ingly. There was no Psychical Society in those days, and no scientific and organised attempt was made to find out all about th^ ghost, though I think some amateur efforts were made in that direction with the con- sent of the proprietor of the establishment. Nothing appears to have come of them, and the story died away. May it not have been, however, that if there ever was a ghost in the house it was a ghost personally con- ducted thither by one of the lodgers ? Men of decayed family, when summoned to town on business, often put up in one of those Norfolk Street lodging-houses. As every- body knows, there are family ghosts attached to certain ancient houses, particularly Scottish and Irish houses — ghosts of a nature like 138 Charing Cross to St. PaiiVs that of the dog who goes about with his master, as well as ghosts of the nature of the cat who abides by the family hearth. Why may not some ghost of the former order have come up to London with the head of the family and stayed in Norfolk Street, and wandering inconsiderately about the passages at midnight have scared some belated lodger, and so set wild rumour afloat ? Then, of course, when the head of the family called for his bill, and had his trunks packed and went away home, the attendant spectre would go away home with him, I wonder what would happen if two travellers brought two ghosts with them ? Or suppose into some house already haunted by its own ghost there were to come a visitor with his family appa- rition in his train ? Would there be a fight, as Artemus Ward puts it in reference to his probable meeting in the happy hunting- grounds above with the red-skinned brother who had robbed him down here on earth ? Do ghosts speak to each other when they meet ? Do they feel in this strange material The Strand 139 world as two Englishmen might do who met in China, and assume that no ceremony of introduction is needed between two kinsmen of race meeting in such an out-of-the-way and foreign region ? We are getting to the region of the Law Courts. Positively I have to stop and pull myself up, and think what that part of the Strand was like before the Law Courts were begun. Temple Bar, of course, one re- collects ; and there was a queer little shop kept by a barber and hairdresser, and there was a passage, a sort of cul-de-sac, opening out of the Strand somewhere about the spot where the principal entrance to the Law Courts is erected — and I think it was called Pickett's Place — and I remember a sad story connected with it. Sad ; yes, to be sure, but very commonplace in its catastrophe, although not perhaps in all its progress. It is only the story of a young man in some- what delicate health who came up to push his way into London literature. He had great gifts and he had a good start. He 140 Charing Cross to St. Paurs besfan to write for some of the best of the magazines and for a daily newspaper. But he turned one day into this dull little Pickett's Place, and there he found his fatality. Fate came to him in the shape of a pretty, coquettish woman who kept a cigar shop. He fell in love with her. She was a married woman, but her husband had left her. My young literary friend fell madly in love with her. It was more like a case of sheer insanity than any other love-madness I have ever known. I have sometimes thought of describing it in a novel, but it would not do. Nobody would believe it. That is the worst about the events of real life : you cannot always venture to make use of them in fiction, for the reader will say they are too improbable to be even interest- ing. It was not merely that my friend gave up his whole heart to her — that anybody might have done for a woman — but he gave up his whole time to her. He spent his every day in the little shop in Pickett's Place. He dropped his club, he was never seen at The Strand 141 his once familiar haunts. He took her out to dinner at some quiet tavern every evening. The whole clay long he sat in that shop talking to her. He neglected his work, gave up his engagement on the daily paper ; did nothing but hang after the skirts of this pretty, saucy young woman. I often used to wonder how he did not feel ashamed of beinf>- seen all day long in that cigar shop by every one who chose to go in. His friends soon came to know that if they wanted to see him they must go to the shop in Pickett's Place. He ceased to write to his people at home ; when they wanted to know anything about him they wrote to me, and I softened things as well as I could. At last I recommended that the young man's mother should come to town and talk to him. She did come, and they had some sad scenes. Nothing could be done. He told his mother that he could not live without this woman's love, and that he meant to hold on to her in the hope that her husband might drink himself to death, and in that event he was determined to marry her. 142 Charing Cross to St. Pmil's He told his mother that there was nothing wrong between them, which I firmly believe, for the little cigar-woman was determined to marry him, and I felt no doubt that she would maintain a rigid propriety in their relationship. I went to her once as a private ambassador from the family, to ask her whether she was not prepared to take what Mr. Labouchere once called "a financial view of the matter." She laughed at the proposi- tion. She was not prepared to take a financial view — that financial view — of the matter. She was determined to marry the young man, and then everything would be hers, she said. So I dropped out of the business, and only saw my infatuated friend from time to time. He gave up his whole life to this woman — his life, his family, his prospects, his literary career, his intellect, his education, his mind, his heart, his better nature, his very soul, to this brainless and unfeeling little creature. At last the husband did "dree his weird," did drink himself to death, and my Antony was married to his Pickett's Place Cleopatra. The Strand 143 Then the wife's one grand calculation proved a complete miscalculation. She had relied on the love of the father and mother for their son, and she felt sure that when once the thing was done they would take him back, and take her with him. They did nothing of the kind ; they could not be induced to take him back. They forgave him, they said ; but that was all, and one cannot live on forgiveness. They did not withdraw the little allowance they used to make him, but it was only a very little allowance. It would have kept a young bachelor well enough in London while he was making a career for himself ; but it was nothing for a man with a wife who, in the very cigar shop itself, had acquired expensive tastes, and could under- stand no affection which did not frequently express itself in champagne. So they dragged on together, he still loving her in a sickly maniacal sort of way. She got cham- pagne — sometimes from him when he had the money, sometimes from others. But she got the champagne, and she began to wear 144 Charing Cross to St. Paurs costly ornaments. Then lie grew jealous, and she told him that she didn't care. A man had no right to marry, she told him bluntly, unless he had the means of keeping a wife according to her tastes. His people had deceived her, she said — they had taken her in ; she never would have married hini if she had known what horrid and hard-hearted people they were. But she meant to amuse herself in life, she declared ; she had had enough of sentimentality. "Did you never love me.'*" he asked, piteously. " Oh, love ! — botheration ! " was her encouraging repl)% and then, further to relieve her feelings, she mentioned that she thought she was marrying a gentleman, and found she had married only a consumptive pauper. Even then he had not the courage to do anything ; he told himself that he could not live without her. Very likely he could not. But he soon found that he certainly could not live with her. She deceived him for a time, then frankly ceased to deceive him, for she took no trouble to conceal any- The Strand 145 thing from him. He died of consumption not long after, poor fellow ! and his true friends were all glad that he had been set free. I had written a strong appeal to his father and mother, and with the dread of his death their anger melted away, and the mother wrote to say that they were both coming up to town to be near him. The letter came when I was standing beside his dead body in the presence of his wife. She took the letter and opened it. Her words summed up the situation. "Oh, bother!" she exclaimed; "what's the good of that now } ' ' Here was a little Marble Heart tragedy in Pickett's Place, off the Strand. I do not know what became of the Marble Heart. I never heard anything of the woman since. I never knew, in all my acquaintanceships, any instance of a promising, manly, generous life being so utterly and completely spoiled by an ignorant, selfish, and stupid little woman. Apart from all considerations of public improvement, I am glad that Pickett's L 1 46 Charmg Cross to St. Paul's Place has gone. I am glad that it has gone, merely because I associated it always with her and with my unhapj)y friend, I am glad that it is gone, and the traffic of the Law Courts tramps every day over its all-but- forgotten grave. V THE LAW COURTS Wk arc in the region of the Law Courts. The Law Courts have created here a region of their own — all their own. It is as when an army suddenly encamps in the close neighbourhood of some decaying old town — a new population, a new trafhc, a new life quickly spring up about it like new vegeta- tion. Mr. Pennell has made this very real for us in his sketches. He brings out with some vivid touches the character and colour of that new life which the Law Courts have created. We are standing in front of the entrances to the courts. Looking eastward we can see the matchless proportions of the mystical Griffin, and farther on the tower 148 Charing Cross to St. Paufs of St. Dunstan's. The tracery of the tower comes exquisitely out, and if one fixes his eyes on it and disdains for a moment the lower level of life, he might fancy himself back in some mediaeval Nuremberg. People in general do not know how London can be glorified, etherealised, mysticised, utterly trans- i'lgured by looking from beneath up to its roofs and chimneys and gables. As we look at the tower of St. Dunstan's now we are easily lifted from the real into the ideal, St. Dunstan has long since lost his giants — so long since that many of the present genera- tion of Londoners do not even know that St. Dunstan ever had giants to lose. " Be- fore St. Mark still glow his steeds of brass," but before St. Dunstan no longer stand his Gog and Magog. Come down, however, from St. Dunstan's and the clouds. Return to the Law Courts. " I mind the bigging o't," as poor Edie Ochiltree says in 77ic Antiquary. I used to go to a newspaper office in the City a good deal about the time when the Courts The Law Courts 149 were bciiiL^ built, and I look an interest in their progress, partly because of the long- controversies in the House of Commons which liad precluded the scheme for their erection — controversies as to site and structure and wliat not, which divided Par- liament into hostile camps on the building question, as it had been divided years before on what T may perhaps call the constitution of South I\ensin!4ton. 'i'he building of the* Law Courts was destined to be the occasion of a different kind of controversy also, for there was a dispute with the workmen, and there was a strike, and tluM'(^ was the im|)orta- tion of forcMgn workmcMi to finish the build- ings, and at on(! time the; prophets of evil shook their heads and said the scheme; had been unlucky from first to last, and the build- ings would never be fmished at all. The; controversy, however, got settled somehow — that conlrov(;rsy ; the Law Courts were built and ()j)ened. I rememlx'r the day well. The Queen in person presided ovc;r the ceremonial in the lon^' narrow central hall. 150 Charing Cross to St. Paiil s It really was a magnificent pageant. I am not very fond of public ceremonials as a rule, but this was a noble sight. The order of the day was for men to wear either uniforms or Court dresses, except as regarded the Bar, of which the members wore the garb of their profession and its rank. No one was allowed to enter in ordinary morning dress — the few men who were not barristers and were not entitled to wear Court dress had to come in evening costume. Of course all the ladies were in full evening dress. I wonder if I may digress for a moment to mention a definition of the right to wear Court dress which was laid down for me once by lips that seemed to breathe forth authority ? It was at a great dinner in the City — a feast given in honour of an eminent statesman and diplo- matist. The cards of invitation prescribed that the guests were to come in uniform or Court dress. Nevertheless, there were several at the tables in ordinary evening garb. I got into talk with my next neigh- bour, who was evidently a civic dignitary A Ch Till'-. CORNI-.U OF KSSF.X STRKKT The Law Couids 153 of high rank, and we spoke on the subject of Court costume. I asked him how it happened that some gentlemen were allowed to come in ordinary evening dress. The truth is, I was smarting under a sense of wrong, for I had put myself into an anti- quated Court suit which I had worn at a Speaker's dinner more than ten years before, and I had thus clad myself because I was under the impression that I should not be allowed in if I came in ordinary evening wear. My instructor said there had to be allowance made for gentlemen who, whatever their personal merits, were not entitled to put on Court dress. This opened a new field of inquiry to me, on which my friend was very willing to give me information. He explained to me all the various positions, dig- nities, offices, functions, acts and deeds, and so on, which entitled a man to put on Court costume. But I urged that surely a man who had not held any of these offices, or done any of these things, or gone through any of these presentation ceremonials, might 154 Charing Cross lo St. Paurs nevertheless put on Court dress if he Hked. My instructor settled the question at once, with dignity and even severity. " He might, sir," he said, "but it would be for hini only fancy dress ! " I questioned no more that day. It was really a great ceremonial. One odd little incident of it made a fantastic impression on me. It was in the earliest days of December 1882. The late Arch- bishop of Canterbury had just died — was not yet buried. The ordinary spectators were arrayed along either side of the great hall, and there was kept open a wide space in the middle — a path by which the Queen and the Royal princes and princesses, and the great dignitaries of Church and State, were to pass to the places reserved for them. Suddenly there was borne along what seemed to be a sort of bier with a recumbent and deathlike figure in it. A shudder passed through some of those who stood near me, and some one in aloud whisper hazarded the explanation that, for some ancient reason or usage, it was held 'Jlic La7c> Courls 155 IxxomiiiL^ that on such an occasion the last Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as his living successor, should be present. This, however, was not the true explanation. The true explanation was simple. Oiu; of the oldest of the judges was in such a condition of h(;alth that he could neither walk nor stand. Ih; was unwilling, however, to remain away from the ctiremoiiial, and h(^ had himself thus borne into th(; hall. I I is palliil lace and closed eyes, as he; was carried past, gave some ground for the startling theory that we were looking on the bi(M- of the dead Archbishop. When the pageantry was over, and the Royal visitors had gone, the doors of th(; hall were thrown o[)en for tlu; gcMieral public, and the gcMieral pui)lic came in with a very ugly rush indexed. I have; seen sonie crowding in my time, but 1 have seldom seen anything more formidable for the moment than that sudden meeting between the vast throng- struggling to get in, and those who were; still left in the hall struoolino- to oet out. I was 156 Charing Cross to St. PauFs one of those who had remained in the hall, not knowinof that the doors were to be thus suddenly thrown open ; and I found myself, with my daughter, all at once in the thick of that terrible crowd. We were swept some- how out of the hall and on to the pavement. A few mounted police were striving to keep back some of the crowd, but the rush was too impetuous, and the force behind the nearest wave too great, to allow of any effectual restraint. I feared for a moment that the ill-luck of the Law Courts was about to be proved in a very ghastly way, and that lives would be lost in that terrible struggle. One poor girl — a nicely -dressed creature apparently of the sempstress class — fell down in a faint not far from where I was battling my way, and some men and women tumbled right over her ; but they were up again in a moment, and they were trying to lift her — the very worst thing they could have done for her — when some police forced their way in and cleared a little space round the girl, and a kindly woman composed her arms and The Lazu Courts 1 5 7 legs, and after a little she sighed and shivered and cried, and then came to all right again. Poor girl ! the woman who attended her opened her firmly -clasped hand and found in it two sixpences — her little stock of funds, no doubt, for the day's holiday, and which even in her swoon she clutched firmly. After all there was no particular harm done to anybody so far as I could make out, but the danger for the moment was very genuine, and the horror of the situation remains clear in my memory. Nothing seems to me more pathetic and pitiful in its way than the half-crazy eagerness of the poorer class of Londoners to see any manner of sight. They will fight, struggle, rush, risk their lives, to see anything. Mothers will carry their little babies into the thick of the roughest crowd on the chance of having a glimpse at anything out of the common. Men and women will wait for hours in cold and rain to see a carriage drive by with some Royal personage in it. They will tramp for miles beside a handful of soldiers marching. The 158 CJiaring Cross to St. PaiiFs utter bareness and barrenness of their ordinary lives makes any novelty welcome to them. What did these men and women expect to see in the Law Courts that day ? All the Royal visitors had been carefully got out of the way before the doors were thrown open. Nothing was to be seen but a long, narrow hall. Such a crowd would not care much about the hall's architectural merits. The hall could be seen the very next day by anybody. But there was the temptation — something, anything, to be seen at once — at once ; and so they risked their limbs and their lives in the one mad overpowering desire to have a sight of it. Two of the bravest and the coolest men I know or have ever known have alike told me that the one thing they most dread is the rush of a great crowd. Even a friendly crowd, I was told by each man, had a terror for him. I know a very plucky girl — and there are many girls a great deal pluckier than most men — who told me she never knew what fear was until she got involved in The Laiu Courts 159 a great crowd at an election. It was a friendly crowd and a good-humoured crowd — would not willingly have hurt a hair of her head — but it was a crowd, and she was helpless to get out of it, and it was helpless to let her out, and she was painfully squeezed, and she saw nothing but the dense mass of coats and shawls and faces, and she felt as if she must faint, and asked herself what would happen to her if she fainted, and the crowd was eagerly rushing on and she was swept along with it ; "and if I faint and fall," she thought, "they must rush over me and must trample me to death." I have seen her on the deck of a Levantine steamer in a white squall off Cape Matapan, and she showed no more fear than if she were at home in her drawing-room ; but the election crowd was too much for her nerves, and she gave way to an utter terror. I must say that I think a London crowd is almost always a good-natured crowd. Lately I passed through a London crowd which all the time I saw it was on a broad i6o C/iariiiLi' Cross lo St. PauPs grin. There was a great function going on in the City, and a procession of carriages was driving along the Strand and Fleet Street. At either side and all alon^ the route a dense wall of men and women, girls and boys, was set up. Every face was en- livened by the same broad grin. What was the source of the mirth } I could not guess — I have not the least idea. What did they see ? Merely a string of carriages, with men and women in evening dress seated therein. No doubt some of us were ridiculous objects enough — that I readily admit. But we can- not all have been ridiculous. That pretty girl, now, so becomingly dressed, with the tall, handsome, soldierly -looking man, her father doubtless — what is there to laugh at in her, or In him, or in both together.'* Yet the grin was as broad while they were pass- ing by as if they had been a pair of figures out of a Punch and Judy show. The mirth was not that of derision ; it had nothing savage, nothing bitterly scornful about it. It was simply the expression of honest, M The Low Courts i6 J irrepressible amusement. For some reason or other we were all of us too much for that crowd — we were simply too ridiculous, and the crowd could not help itself — it must needs grin. It was trying, I confess, to he thus regarded as the laughing-stock of a good-natured crowd, which evidently did not want to offend or annoy us, but could not possiljly keep from laughing at us. It was trying to have to pass slowly along through a mile or so of a throng every face in which was distended by this one unceasing and unchanging smile at us. Let us hope the ordeal may have done some of us good — may have helped to take the conceit out (^f us. It is not thus we are usually fond enough to regard ourselves — not as mere objects of the laughter of a crowd of our fellow -mortals. There can hardly be the self-conceit in man or woman which would not have some of the starch taken out of it by that promenade between those two lines of grinning faces. Mr. Pennell has drawn a flower-girl in one of these sketches. She is 164 Charing Cross to St. Pauis to be seen near the entrance to the Law Courts. She is a sonsie girl, with a broad mouth and a great smile : " Does she call all that a smile?" — I think 1 am quoting the words of some popular burlesque. It is a big smile, certainly, and 1 am sure that smile must have smiled at me, not on me. the day I had to face that singular ordeal. Well, she is a pleasant-looking girl, and I owe her no ill-will, even though she did honestly think me and my companions ridiculous creatures, and did frankly acknowledge the conviction by the distortion of her expressive countenance. Observe the different types (^S. lawyer which ]\Ir. Pennell is able to show us. See that lawyer with the clean-shaven face ; see that other with the moustache and beard and eye-glass. These are two contrasting types. The clean-shaven lawyer has his very soul in his profession. He has not a thought beyond it — he would not allow himself to have a thought beyond it, even if he could. He never reads anything but The Law Coitris 165 briefs and law rc[)orts. II(; never talks of anythiiiL^ but cases and venliits and judij"- ments. Ih; lias nev^er l)een known to lan^h at anytliini;' but one of his own jokes of course in court or any joke delivtM'cd by a judi^c I'dia says of himself that if the sun were some day to take to risino- in the west and pursuing' a stc*ady course (east- ward, he, i'dia, would never notice anything' unusual in the revcM'sed [)rogress. Neither would our close-sha\'en lawyer, unl(;ss sonn; one wert; to invite his att(;ntion to the pheno- menon, and even then he would not trouble his mind Ioul;' about it. Why should he ? It would have no particular bearini;' on the case of l)()x versus Cox or Pattcu" i>ci'siis Clatter. How hard he works, our clean- shaven lawyer! lie has a pull at his briefs late at nioht— last thing at night — -and he is up early in the morning, and the moment he is cleanly shaven he goes at them again. I have seen him in a drawing-room after a dinner-party cre(;p to a sofa and s(;ttle down there, and rest his head on the arm of the 1 66 Charing Cross to St. Paufs sofa and have a quiet little sleep — all from sheer physical exhaustion. Then in a few niinutes he is awake and alert again. Now look at our other friend, the lawyer with the moustache and the beard and the eye-glass. He is an able man in his professional way too, but he does not surrender life absolutely to law and the Law Courts. Not he, indeed. Why, you can see by the first glance at him that he is a leading man in his Volunteer corps, that he is fond of ritle-shooting, that he likes to knock about the billiard-balls. Vou can sec hini on his horse in the Row every morning, and you may come upon him on a Sunday evening at Hurlingham, and there is seldom a first night of any importance in a London West- End theatre when he is not to be seen in one of the stalls. He enjoys life — he enjoys even his law cases ; he is in good spirits about them ; he takes them as a game, as an amusement, rather than as a duty and a business. But he never talks about them at a dinner-party — he will talk of anything else rather. Will The Law Courts 167 he get on in his profession ? Oh yes, he is getting on in his profession. There is no reason why he should not run his clean- shaven rival hard in the race. There are different ways of doing the same sort of work — of reaching the same end, that is all. Prince Hal takes to the battle in one spirit, Harry Hotspur in another. By the way, in Shakespeare's rendering it is Prince Hal who carries the day. I admire the exterior of the Law Courts. I am told I ought not to do so, and that it is not the right thing to admire any part of the structure, outside or inside. But I cannot help myself — I cannot get over my invincible ignorance, and I stop every now and then in front of the Courts and look on them with admiration. I also admire the long, narrow hall. But my admiration comes to a stop there. Anything meaner, more uncomfortable, more ugly than the various little courts themselves, was never [)ut togethcir by the perverted ingenuity of man. It would be hard to exaecferate the 1 68 C/iarino; Cross to St. Paii/'s utterly paradoxical character of these re- markable courts. They are too small ; they are too large ; they are too dark ; they are too glaring- ; they are too hot ; they are too cold ; it is impossible to hear what a witness is saying, and yet each court is like a whispering gallery to send along the muttered gossip of some idle spectator. The draughts that howl through these rooms make one fancy he is in the Cave of yEolus. The orcat curtains which are huncT at the doors are so arranoed that thev involve the hapless stranger trying to enter as if he were beintr rolled in a huQe blanket. If you are seated securely in the court it is interesting to watch the struggles of this hapless stranger. You see his form bulging here and there through the thick drapery in which he has ignorantly invested himself He thought he had nothing to do but to draw the curtain aside and go in : he did draw the curtain aside, but it took him into its folds and rolled itself round and round him, and look how he is struoohno- rioht- The Law Courts 169 fully to bo free! He pluno-es this way, and tlu! curtain [)lung(j.s with him ; that way, and the curtain takes a new twist about him. At last h(; emeri^es, wrathful, shameful, his face r(;d and olowinm', and his hat — his |)0()r hat, which he has had to carry in his hand through the thick of the fight ! He knows that his face is dirty as well as red, for the curtain has clung to his bc;- wildered countenance, and he is not without a fear that my Lord on the bench may have seen him, and may have thought he was doing it all for the fun of the thing, and perhaps may commit him for contempt of court. Contempt of court indeed ! Who is there that could avoid feeling a contempt for that court ? I speak, needless to say, of the chamber, not of the judges who are compelled to sit in it or the majesty of the; law which they represent. I have heard judges themselves express over and over again their utter contempt for that court, even while they were sitting in it and administering justice. Indeed, the ex- I JO Charing Cross to St. Pau/'s pression of their contempt was in itself an administration of justice. I made an interesting acquaintance once in the precincts of these Law Courts. I made the acquaintance of a young barmaid. "Ye smile; I see ye, ye profane ones," as Byron says. She was occupied at one of the refreshment stalls near to a court which I used to have to attend. She was once a little distressed at the attentions of two young men somewhat of the 'Any class. There was no one else there except myself, and she gave a pleading side-glance at me which told me beyond mistake or doubt that she wished me, and my graver and elder presence, to remain there until the 'Arries had taken their drink and Qone their way. They did not mean to be rude, and they were not really rude in any offensive way, but they were chaffing each other about sweethearts, and then they began to ask her about her sweethearts, and she did not like it. They went away soon, and then she talked to me in the KNTKANCK TO THE COURTS The Law Courts 173 frankest and most pleasant way. She was well-mannered and modest, and her talk was interesting. She told me she hardly ever met with any rudeness of any kind, but that she did not like being chaffed, and she was a little afraid of the two 'Arries. She did not know much about the business of the courts. She asked me if I was con- cerned in a case, and I said I was ; and she asked me if it was something- about property, and I said no — that it was not a civil matter at all — that it was a trial in a criminal court. She asked me if I was prosecuting some one, and I said no -some one was prosecuting me, which was per- fectly true, for I was " had u[) " as a criminal conspirator. She was greatly puzzled, and evidently did not know how to reconcile my position with the favourable opinion she had allowed herself to form of me. 1 could see, however, that she was too good-hearted to permit any serious suspicion to invade her, and that she took it for granted there must be some reputable 1 74 Charing Cross to St. Paufs explanation. I did not see her again for months. My next appearance in court was, as Mr. Micawber puts it, " in the capacity of defendant in Civil process." I went to the refreshment stall again and saw my friend. She was pleased to see me, and asked how I had got on in my former case, and I told her I had got off, which again a little puzzled her, and that this time I was only mixed up in a civil case. She wished me luck in that too, and I thanked her and felt thankful. She asked me if I had just come to town, and whether the weather was fine in my part of the country. She was naturally under the impression that I only came up to town every now and then to bear a part in some law case. We had some pleasant talk together, and I left her with a kindly feel- ing, regarding her as a friendly, fresh, intelligent, and lady -like girl. She has for me another interest, too, in the fact that she is the only barmaid with whom, so far as I can remember, I ever exchanged a The Laiv CoiLvts 175 single word that did not belong strictly to the business of my demand and her supply. I do not believe that I ever before got even so far into conversation with a young lady at a refreshment counter as to hazard a remark on the fairness or the foulness of the weather. In front of the Griffin the traffic gets all crowded together. A policeman stands dignified and motionless in the midst of it-^ a grand sight. Nothing disturbs him. The waves seem to beat on him in vain. He stands like the Eddystone Lighthouse in a storm. He seems, however, to be, unlike the Eddystone, somewhat conscious of the dignity of his position and his demeanour. How, indeed, could he possibly be uncon- scious of the one and the other } He can stop all that movement of traffic with a wave of his majestic hand. He could say to that stream of omnibuses, "Thus far, and no farther — for the moment — until I bid you go forward again." He can give pause to that swift-darting hansom, whose occupant, cran- I ;o C/tan'/to Cross /{) S/. Pir///'s ino- over the doors with eap^er, impatient gaze, is cvidcnllv bent on irvinii to catch some train. Init. no — whether he catch the train or miss it. there must his cab stand motion- less until the steadfast policeman sets it free to go its way. Even that stately carriage, with the splendid footmen and the two elegantly -dressed ladies who recline on its cushions — even that must stand when he conimands. lie is nor without respect and even reverence, in a wav. for carriages and their owners, but when duty has to be done he can be as severe with a coroneted barouche as with a donkey-cart. 1 always think that the tratlic-directing policeman in the middle oi the roadway has one distinct advantage over the policeman promenading along the footpath in the fact that he is not asked many questions. One could not stop in the midway of that torrent of traffic to ask the policeman anything. But the officer on the sidewalk, how he is beset with questions ! You see him in Mr. Pennell's sketches just as vou niay see him everv dav in real life, >. r .t:i\ to all. I do not often agree with th(^ political opinions of the World, but one must re- cognise the fact that here is a clever Society paper which a young woman may read. Gossip — personal gossip ? No doubt per- sonal gossii) is an objectionable thing from the; point of view of the higher morality ; and of course the point of view of the higher morality ought to be the point of view of every one of us. Only it is not. And we do nearly all of us indulge, and even delight, in personal gossip, even when it is spiced with a little scandal. Is it not something, then, to have our personal gossip served up to us by clever men — and I suppose I may say by clever women — by men and women of education, who understand and instinctively feel where the line ou'i the wayfarers could hardly fail to be struck by the hill, and the Cathedral on its brow. But then the men of practical progress, even if they are willing to admit all this, will ask us what are the artistic or astliolic glimpses of a few visionaries and dreamers when compared with the comfort and the convenience <>{ the thousands and thousands who pass along in the railway, backwards and forwards, every day ? There it is, you see. If the controversy were to go on all over again, I shoukl not take part in it. Not that I have changed my opinions in the least as to the general principle or as to this particular instance. Hut where is the good of arguing on such a subject ? The artistic always goes down before what is called the practical in a matter like that. " Keep ycnir breath to cool your mem'' ■ ■ "' W/W:'^M '(SKL # I.UDflATK flKCUS Litdgatc Hill 219 porridge," was a good old Scottish proverb. Keep your controversial ardour for something in which it may possibly prevail. Against railway bridges, and telegraph wires, and other such works, it is of no account. Against the genius of street placard and advertisement it is of no account. The most beautiful and venerable parts of our most venerable and stately structures must be accounted as of nothing when the genius of Civilisation has need of a blow-hole on the road hard by. We are not worse than other civilised peoples. We are only doing as the Romans do — -observe the recent improve- ments in what a Complete Letter-writer calls "the Imperial City of the Caesars." There will be tramways in Jerusalem yet — perhaps there are such already ; some years have passed since I was in Jerusalem. I^oes any one know a lovelier river than the fludson, about West Point ? I do not. But the rocks on the margin are utilised for the purpose of advertising in flaring characters the virtues of this man's bitters and that 220 C/iarino Cross to St. Pauls •e> olhci" mans pills. Thcrctore I, for one, give u[) the fight. Lot Mr. Ruskin battle on; he is " possessed," in the demoniac sense, by a principle ; lie has a mission. I would en- courage him and wish him success, if there were the slightest ho[ie ; but there is not. So why slunild London wait — for the effacing and reccMistructing lingers o\. modern utility 'i Let them efface ; let them reconstruct. Some of us can still see in memory the Ludgate Mill that was. Most oS. us do not care what it was, or what it is, or what it is to be. But I may be alKnvcnl to express a little regret that Mr. l\'nnell did not see it and sketch it before the beginning oi the process which is to improve it " from the face of all creation — off the face i:>{ all creation." Some words which I read lately in a most touching story by M. Anatole France, come back to my memory poignantly : " I grow sad, some- times," says the noble old scholar who is su[iposed to tell the story, " to think that the effort which we make — we cultured persons, so called — to retain and [^reserve dead things l.ui{i^aU' 1 1 ill 2 2 I is a weary and a vain effort. All that has lived is the necessary aliment of new existences. The Aral) who hiiilds himself a iuit with the marhles of the temj)les of I'.ilmyra is more philosophic than all the con- servators (jf the nuiseums of London, of Paris, and of Munich." So says the vener- able hero of " I'he crime of .Silvestn^ Bonnard, Memlx^r ol the Institute." Then what a j)hil()Soi)her was the Turk who, like; a practical scjldier, used the pillars and statues of the l-*arthenon as targets ! lUit dear old M. Bonnard did not mean what he said. I !<; was in a mood of despondency— a mood of despair. He was giving up the fight he had fought so long in vain, lie had not Mr. Ruskin's mission. lie threw down his broken sword, but could not resist the temptation to lling a few words of sarcasm and scorn in the face of the confjuering Utility. What a turmoil there is about laidgate Circus! What njofs, what tel(,'graph wires — what placards, ensigns, advertisements 222 Charino- Cross to St. Paul' s high in air — what omnibuses, carriages, carts, cabs, donkey-carts, the cart which the costermonger pushes before him, the mail- carts, the carts of the Star newspaper, equally red with those of Her Majesty's mail, the oblong carts of the Parcel Post — all these are on the earth, and make the firm ground look like a quaking bog. The great signs that are hung out across the fronts of houses, and on the tops of houses, make Ludgate Circus look like a part of New York. The Obelisk rises out of the throng in the street like a solitary camel's head out of the crowd of a pilgrimage. The spire rising out of the pell-mell has more signifi- cance. It invites us all to look up — up — above " the city's rout and noise and humming." I wonder how many wayfarers in each day are touched by the appeal of the spire and look upwards ! I wonder how many who do look upwards are impelled thereto by the spire's silent admonition, and are the better for it ! That man yonder now — he is looking up. He is gazing upwards /''^^> Jl 1 ' ^'h/l Hilll iJ^'yT .v'A T\rf ?i' I" U'^m "'¥€ ^ VVILU S HOTEL Ludgate Hill 225 very earnestly — so earnestly that he runs into the chest of a rough-looking person in a fur cap, who is walking westward and striv- ing the while to keep his eyes on something eastward. The two collide, and our sky- gazer makes an apology which sounds like an imprecation. Was that all the lesson he learned from the teaching of the church spire ? No ; he would have learned some- thing better if he had sought teaching there. But he was only looking up to the sky to see if it was going to rain. He was put into a bad humour by the ominous aspect of the closing and darkening clouds, and so when the chance collision took place he was in the mood for an imprecation. By the way, do not look for the men or the collision in Mr. Pennell's sketch ; they are my own invention. Mr. Pennell's pencil is too good to be em- ployed in working out such poor conceits. The only thing worth noticing in this poor conceit is that it illustrates a peculiarity of the London streets, which I have long been observing with a certain interest. 2 26 C ha ring Cross to St. PauTs Along London pavements — and I suppose the pavements of other cities as well — the men and women of what I may call, for want of any better term, the educated classes, walk straight on with their eyes to the front of them. If they want to look into a shop window they stop in their walk, go up to the shop window, and look into it. But while they are on the march they look before them. Now observe the men and women, the lads and lasses, of what we must call, for lack of a better word, the uneducated class. You will observe that five out of every six of them are walking one way and looking another way. Something a little distance behind him has caught a man's attention. It may be an organ and a monkey, it may be an Oriental foreigner, it may be an upset hansom or a fallen horse, it may be anything". He cannot take his eyes from it, and so he keeps on walking backwards. He is moving, indeed, towards his destination, but he still looks back to that he has left behind him. Observe Mary Jane — or shall Liidgate Hill 227 we say Betsinda ? — with her perambulator and her two young" charges. She drives them on directly, recklessly, remorselessly ; but all the time her eyes are with her heart, and that is in the shop windows, where all the beautiful, beautiful things are displayed for sale — the bonnets, the unmade-up silks, the mantles of stamped velvet, the gauzy dresses, the bewitching under-things that the Queen of the Fairies might wear, so delight- fully gossamer - like are they. She steers her perambulator into groups of infuriated pedestrians ; she rattles the bones of the infants not only over the stones of the side- walk, but over many living toes and insteps and up sharply against human ankles. Elderly ladies will deliberately stop, and admonish and scold and threaten her. They demand the name of her mistress, in order that they may be enabled to lodge formal complaint against her. Betsinda cares little for all that. When the row is over she looks before her, and steers straight for some thirty seconds or so. Then her head turns 228 Charing Cross to St. Paiifs on its axis again, her eyes gaze sideward. She is with the bonnets and the dresses once more, and with fearless faith she commits her precious burden to the care of the powers above. If any one has not noticed this condition of facts, this curious distinction of classes, I can only pray him to open his eyes when next he makes his way through a crowded street in London, and then say whether my general observation is not correct. I suppose the philosophical explanation is not far to seek. The working man is hurrying to his work — he is tied to time. Betsinda has been sent out for a clearly - defined hour or two hours. The whistling errand- boy must get his errands done within at least plausible distance of punctuality and prompt- ness. The young woman with the washing- is already looked for here and there. These people cannot afford to lounge. If they have hurried past some sight that interests them they cannot quietly turn back, and composedly feast their eyes upon it. All L^tdgate Hill 229 they can do they do — and that is to keep looking sidewards or backwards, and retain it within their range of vision as long as they may, while still hurrying onward in the other direction — careless of collision, regardless of reproach. The boy, of course, is the most reckless of all. He will come rattling along the pavement at a hand-gallop, with his head positively twisted behind him like that of a professional contortionist. No matter what the risk to himself or to others, he will not lose sight of anything that amuses or in- terests him so long as his straining eyes in his contorted head can hold it within his perverse horizon. If he gets into a collision with some steady wayfarer he does not mind. Indeed, he considers it prime fun. The threats of an elderly gentleman have no terror for him ; at the worst he can run much quicker than the elderly gentleman. For the admonitions of an elderly lady he has no ear. He interrupts her lecture, perhaps, by some disparaging remark upon her bonnet ; possibly he asks her, with sudden affectation 230 C//an'uo' Cross to St. Paurs of friendly and intimate interest, "What price that ? " He does not wait to hear what the cost of the article may have been, but plunges whistling on his way. The attempted admonition has done nothing but to make the elderly lady, her very self, an object of droll curiosity to him, and he now keeps his head twisted backward to enjoy as long as he can the sight of her bewilderment and her futile anoer. Do not ascend Ludgate Hill without bestowing a thought on Paternoster Row. Manv an anxious heart has beat hierh as the owner and bearer of the heart paused in trepidation on the threshold of some house in the Row. To the young and timid author the place was holy ground. Many such aspirants must have felt inclined to put their somewhat broken shoes from off their feet in an cHort at propitiation. The place is less distinctively, less exclusively, literary now than it was in former days. There are publishers now in Piccadilly and the Strand, and Oxford Street, and Albemarle Street, -' a 111' V, m^ ST. martin's, MIDGATK Ludgate Hill 233 and Burlington Street, and Covent Garden, and Cornhill, and many other places ; hut some of the greatest of publishing houses still hold on to the Row, and several newer houses have started life there. Talk of London ghosts — talk of haunted London — what region could be more ghost-frequented than Paternoster Row ? The ghosts of all the literary projects which perished in their early youth ; the novels, the poems, the essays, the volumes of travel, the transla- tions, which died in Paternoster Row — which the public would not keep alive, which the world only too willingly let die ! I should think that at every midnight there must be as many spectral forms in that gloomy lane as were gathered at the midnight revic^w of the dead Napoleon in the German poem. I would go there some midnight to see, only for fear of one pale little ghost which I do not wish to meet : it is the ghost of a volume of translations from a foreign poet, at which I once toiled. Let it pass ; let us speak no more of it. There was to me one comfort 234 CJiaring Cross to St. Paul's in its failure. No one knew anything about it. The reproach of the death fell not on my head. I name it not. As Beranger said of Waterloo, "Its name shall never sadden page of mine." St Paul's ! We are standincr inside the great doorway which looks upon the statue of Queen Anne, and the railway bridge, and the crowd below. Few people who pass hurriedly by have any idea of the simplicity, the sympathy, the solemnity of that entrance — that porch. Mr. Pennell has put but a few — a very few — figures there. A young- man stands on the threshold and looks down on the perpetual movement of the street. A girl is just about to go down the steps and plunge into the living stream. A man and woman have just come within the porch. They are strangers evidently ; they look with awe. and move with reverential slowness. The man has already taken off his hat. Dr. Johnson would approve of him. The whole sketch admirably suggests the presence of a solemn sanctuarv. It is a sanctuarv — a Ludgate Hill 235 sanctuary from the crowd, and the rush of business, and the struggle for money, and all the incarnate vulgarities of common daily life. It ought to do one's soul some good just to look up at that great temple as he passes on his way. Within all is quiet. No service is going on, but the organ is breathing, and there are a few listeners scattered here and there in the cool semi-darkness. St. Paul s is well placed — there in the very thick of the crowd and the traffic. It would show to more advantage, no doubt, if it were set upon an open plateau. I knew a dreamy man once who had a great ambition. He wanted to be rich, enormously rich, and for what do you think ? That he might buy up all the houses round St. Paul's, and all the ware- houses and wharves between it and the river, and clear them completely away, and allow the cathedral to stand revealed in all its pro- portions, isolated on a broad clear elevation above the Thames. My friend's was indeed an artistic and an exalted ambition. With what pride the Londoner — with what fresh 2^6 Charins: Cross to St. Paii/'s ■3 delight and wonder the stranger — would see that dome and those walls rising unin- terrupted, undisfigured, in full display above the Thames ! Where in the heart of any great city would there be such another view of a grand cathedral ? But, after all, is it not better as it is ? Is not the place of such a cathedral more fittingly set in and amidst the crowd ? The work of the pastor does not lie in picturesque and dignified solitude, but among the houses, and the cottages, and the garrets. I always think in this way of St. Paul's. Let it stand there with the waves of the world's traffic beating on its very steps. Some wayfarer may come ashore now and then and mount the steps, and enter the quiet and darkling church, and be reminded that the city is not all the world and all the worlds. I like to think of that dome risino- hicjh above all those roofs, and chimneys, and gables, and signs, and advertisements, and telegraph wires. I do not care to think of the whispering-gallery and the show-places of any kind, or even of the tomb of " the Duke " himself, or of any of Litdgate Hill 237 the curious monuments in which half-draped personages from classic mythology pretend to be in grief over sturdy British soldiers and sailors. I do not care for the hum and drone of the verger explaining all about his sights. All that has, to my mind, nothing to do with the reality of St. Paul's. The mission of St. Paul's, to iny thinking, is in its standing firmly planted there, in the very centre of the commonplace traffic, and bearing its silent testimony to other and greater realities. It stands and lifts its dome into the air, and its dome is surmounted by that Cross, which surely any creed or sect of men who are worshippers of anything may recognise to be, as this very Cross on St. Paul's was described in the last generation by a great parliamentary orator who was not of the English Church, " a sign of hope — a signal of salvation ! " VIll ST. Paul's What a natural habil it is to personate into living and even into human lonn some inan- imate object or structure with which one has become familiar and which is dear ! No wonder that in the days of the Dryads people oave life and character and human svm- pathies to every tree and fountain and river which they had long known and which they loved. W^e nearly all find ourselves doing much the same sort of thing with buildings which wo have lono- known, and which have grown to be in a certain sense a part of our existence. I always thus endow St, Paul's Cathedral with life and human nature and sympathy. I cannot ■S/. Paul's 239 well explain what early associations and chances have made St. Paul's a more living influence to me than the much grander and nobler Westminster Abbey ; but so it is, and I feel as if St. Paul's were a living in- fluence over all that region of the metropolis which is surveyed by its ball and its cross. But in another sense it is unlike other build- ings to me. It is not one long-lived, long- lived cathedral ; it is rather a generation of cathedrals. Westminster Abbey takes us back in unbroken continuity of history to the earlier days of England's budding greatness. Westminster itself, nevertheless, was only called so in the beginning to distinguish it from the earlier East Minster, which was either the existing St. Paul's or a cathedral standing on Tower Ilill. It would seem, then, that St. Paul's rather than Westminster Abbey ought to represent the gradual movement of English history and English thought, and the growth of the metropolis. But observe the difference. Westminster Abbey has always, since its erection in the old days about the time when 240 C/iariNi^- Cross to St. Pauls Pan was definitely giving up the use of his Pagan horn, been sedately watching over London. It has been reconstructed here and there, of course — repaired and renovated, touched up and decorated with new adorn- ments in tribute of grateful piety ; but it is ever and always the same Westminster Abbey. Now observe the history of St. Paul's. St. Paul's has fallen and died time after time, and been revived and restored. It has risen new upon new generations. It has perished in tlame again and again, like a succession of martyrs, and has come up afresh and with new -spangled ore tlamed in the forehead of the mornino- skv. St. Paul's is a religious or ecclesiastical dynasty rather than a cathedral. It has been destroyed so often, and has risen aoain in so manv different shapes, that it seems as if each succeeding age were putting its fresh stamp and mint- mark on it, and so commending it to the special service of each new generation. One cannot but think that — let its authorities, its Dean and Chapter, and the rest, take all the S/. Pau/'s 241 best and most devoted care they can of it — St. Paul's is not destined to hold its present shape for a very long stretch of time. I do not desire my words to be like the story of the watchful and warned parent which is found in all literatures, from ^sop and the Arabian Nights downwards — the story of the father who is warned that an early death is impending over his dear and only son, and who locks the boy for greater security into a lofty tower or into a subterranean cavern — the tale is told in different ways — and behold it is all of no use, for the very precautions taken to save the lad only tend to his earlier and surer destruction. It may be thus with the Cathedral of St. Paul's. I hope the Dean and Chapter will not think me ill-omened with my propheciesof evil. I hope they will not feel to me as is usually felt by less considerate and enlightened persons towards even the well-intentioned who set out to warn and to alarm with forebodings of evil things to come. I have no warning to give, and therein I am no doubt less excusable than most of those 242 Charing Cross to St. Paul's who forecast sad troubles, for I cannot pre- tend to have any idea of what the danger is, or how it may be averted, or whence it is to arrive. I know nothing about it. and the Dean and Chapter themselves do not wish well to their noble Cathedral more cordially than 1 do. Hut I keep thinking of the past, anti 1 cannot help murmuring to myself that the mission of St. Paul's is. as I have said, to be a succession or dynasty of cathedrals, and not to be one perennial structure with time- proof and fire-proof walls and an unbroken history. 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The Saxons in the Isle of Wight. By Frank Cowi'KK. With Illustrations. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 5s. "The author has accomplished the difficult task of giving life and interest to his picture, and a perusal of the book will give boys a truer idea of the manners and customs of then- rough forefathers than any other with which we are acquainted." — Staiiiiaiii. THE CAPTAIN OF THE WIGHT. A Romance of Carisbrooke Castle. By Fr.\nk Covvper. With Illustrations. Third Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 5s. "Mr. Cowper has produced a very attractive story, and one which deserves, and will doubtless secure, many readers." — Spectator. BELT AND SPUR: Stories of the Knights of Old. With Coloured Illustrations. Fifth Thousand. Crown 8vo. Price 5s. "A very high-class gift -book of the spirit-stirring kind." — Spectator. ".\ sort of boy Froissart with admirable illustrations."^ — Pall Mail Gazette. BORDER LANCES : A Romance of the Northern Marches in the time of Edward II. By the Author of " Belt and Spur." With Coloured Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 5s. " The book is a good one . . . the illustrations are excellent." — Spectator. FOREST OUTLAWS ; OR, St. Hugh and the King. A Tale of the time of Henry II. By the Rev. E. Gilli.-^t. With Sixteen Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 6s. " Distinctly one of the very best books of the season." — Stam/anl. JOHN STANDISH. The Rising of Wat Tyler. By the Rev. E. GiLLiAT. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 5s. " The author, Mr. E. Gilliat, is well known as a successful writer of semi-historical fiction, and in this little book is quite up to his usual standard." — Guardian. London : SEELEY & CO., Limited, Essex Street, Strand. m.1991 4 o V .XN^-^' '■' \ . » ' • * V^ " .0 o. v' . ^ •■ " .•0' '^^• .\^ \^' '^,. .0 -:, V^ .v^ . '■-. -* '-^ CP ^> V.N. ''r. ..x^-\^ <^_^ ♦ ^ <=:^ ■ V- \^' .\^ v^^\ .0^ <.'*^'r^~v^ .i^ O 0^ .•■^' a\ ''^K. .<^' »<• V, .0 o^ 0' ,/ \^' ^x. o> ■''ct-. ^ C,'^' . 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