Highways and Byways in London

But, if the East and the West have their wide and radical differences, between the two there are, as I said, many recurring types. And the constant Londoner, were he suddenly to be brought, blindfolded, to some hitherto unknown spot in the city or near suburbs, would soon know his whereabouts by the look of the people he encountered. Thus, you may know Bloomsbury by its Jews, as well as by a population remarkable for general frowsiness, a look of "ingrained" dirt, and an indescribable air of having seen better days; Chelsea, by a certain art-serged female, and long-haired male community with an artistic,—and, yes,—perhaps a well-pleased and self-satisfied air; the "City," by its black-coated business men; Whitechapel, by its coster girls with fringes; Somers Town and Lisson Grove, by their odoriferous cats and cabbages; Mayfair, by its sleek carriage-horses, and also by the very superior maids and butlers you meet in its silent streets. Or, perhaps, by the straw that occasionally fills the quiet square corners, sounding the sad note of Death. I have seen a slum child dying of cancer in a crowded garret,—baked by the August sun,—covered with flies,—in a noisy alley; but only rich people's nerves require soothing at the last!

Miss Amy Levy has written a haunting little poem on this subject:

"London," says a French writer, "resembles, in its size and luxury, Ancient Rome." But, if Ancient Rome, he adds, weighed heavily upon its toiling slaves, "how heavily does not our modern Rome weigh, also, upon the labouring class!" The hanging gardens of Park Lane are in as great, and greater contrast to the Somers Town, Drury Lane, and Deptford slums, as were ever the Palaces of the Palatine to the slaves' quarters. London is the best city in the world to be rich in, the worst to be very poor in; as it is the best city for happiness, the worst for misery. It is the Temple of Midas, where everything,—from a coffin to a hired guest,—from the entrée to an "exclusive" mansion to a peer's status,—can be bought with money. Here, more than anywhere else, money is imperatively needed. Even the poor hawkers who live in unspeakable slums, lined with cats and cabbages, in Lisson Grove, might, if they lived in the country, at least have clean cottages, gardens, and pure air. With the same income on which you are poor in town, you will be well-to-do, nay, rich in the country. House-rent,—indirect taxation,—the vicinity of tempting shops,—and amusements take the surplus. The attractions of town must indeed be great to the poor; for, if their wages be higher, their life is infinitely lower. But it is the same in all classes. It is often said that the rich, who own so many large and luxurious country estates, houses, and gardens, are ill-advised to come up to town and spend hot Mays and Junes in baking Belgravia or Mayfair; but, after all, they only share the tastes of the majority. Man is a gregarious animal, and loves his kind. Similarly, if you were to make a "house-to-house visitation" in some wretched Lisson Grove or East End slum, and inquire diligently of every inhabitant, whether they would prefer to "go back and live in the lovely country," their answer, I am convinced, would be firmly in the negative. East and West are alike in this.

But the key-note of the East End of London, apart from its big thoroughfares, is not so much squalor or poverty, as desperate, commonplace monotony, such as is described by Mrs. Humphry Ward in Sir George Tressady, "long lines of low houses,—two storeys always, or two storeys and a basement,—all of the same yellowish brick, all begrimed by the same smoke, every door-knocker of the same pattern, every window-blind hung in the same way, and the same corner 'public' on either side, flaming in the hazy distance." The East End is very conservative, and in its better houses there is a conservatism even in the blinds, which are, almost invariably, of cheap red rep or cloth, alternated by dirty "lace." With the poorest tenants, of course, blinds are at a discount; and grimy paper fills the frequent holes in the panes.

Yet, it is a mistake to suppose, as is more or less the popular theory, that the average East Ender's life is all unmitigated gloom. Take, for instance, the life of the honest, hard-working artisan and his family. He may live in "mean streets"; but use is everything; and they are not "mean" to him. Possibly, from his point of view, the two-pair back, the frowsy street, are "a sight more homely and cosy" than rich people's area gates and chilly grandeur. If the West End takes its pleasure by driving in the Park, the East, on the other hand, finds its relaxation on the tops of 'buses and trams, in walking about the flaring, gas-jetted street, in looking into shop windows, or in driving about in all the pride of a private, special coster's cart. If the rich do not know how the poor live, the poor, on the other hand, have but a hazy idea of how the rich live. If you asked the average slum-dweller how the rich spend their day, they would most likely say, "in drinking champagne and driving in motor cars." Thus the classes mutually do each other injustice. If the poor, for a while, could live the life of the rich, they would vote it terribly slow; Calverley was not so far out when he suggested slyly that

"Unless they've souls that grovel,
Folks prefer in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls."

The poor of the East End have their special plays, their theatres, their "halls," their cheap popular amusements. And they have other minor compensations. They "eat hearty" when they do eat; they do not fall ill from dyspepsia or have to go to Carlsbad; or if they do suffer from M. Taine's favourite complaint, "the spleen" (which is unusual in a working man), they remedy it by a little harmless correction of their wives. Or if a poor woman's child is ill, she does not suffer for want of medical advice; she bundles it up quickly in a shawl, and runs with it to the nearest hospital, where, if the authorities are somewhat curt, she at any rate gets plenty of sympathy from all the other mothers in the big hospital waiting-room. Even that large, shabby crowd that, on visiting-days, await the opening of the hospital doors, so unutterably pathetic to the looker-on, is not, perhaps, without its alleviations. It is a mercy that we do not all like the same thing; and that, while the rich are exclusive, the poor will enjoy society of almost any kind: "We shall 'ave to leave our lodgin's, 'm, over them nice mews," a poor woman said to me lately, in a mournful tone. "The landlord, he's takin' the place down; an' I shall miss the 'orses' feet at night, somethin' shockin'; they was sech comp'ny like." Here, surely, is a case where one man's poison may be another man's meat!

As for the children of the working classes, they, unless their parents are lazy or given to drink, really have, often, a far better time of it, so far as their own actual enjoyment is concerned, than the more repressed children of the rich. The pavement is their property, the streets are their world; the beautiful, dazzling, magical, ever-changing streets, with their myriad attractions, their boundless possibilities. Then, the children of the poor are not brought up as useless luxuries, but, from tender years, are required to contribute their share of help to the household; and what the average child loves above all things is to feel itself of use. Dirt and grime are of no account whatever to the child; and old clothes are always far more comfortable than new to play about in. The "shades of the prison house" may close in, later, about the children of the poor, when they must go to service, to the factory, to the shop; but, in their early years, their life has its attractions.

Of course, however, with the families of the drunkard, the shiftless, the lazy, the case becomes altogether different. Drifting hopelessly from one slum to another, these soon help to swell the sad ranks of the "submerged tenth": poor creatures whose misery shivers in fireless garrets and damp cellars, whose empty stomachs call in vain for food; and whose only outlook is the workhouse, the "big villa" as they call it; an institution, however, that they will only enter from dire necessity, regarding it, as a rule, with wholesome dislike and disfavour.

There are many churches and chapels all over London, yet the very poor rarely attend any of them. Indeed, very few London working men's wives attend any religious service, unless, that is, they happen to boast of a new hat or bonnet.... They will, however, receive the "visitor" or "tract-lady" with a sort of chilly grandeur; and, though their acquaintance with Holy Writ is generally slight, through all life's troubles their favourite text is ever this: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Thus, they are always, so to speak, comforting themselves for the enforced payment of the insurance of hard work and poor fare in this life by the assurance of paid-up capital with interest, in the next! Poor, hard-worked mothers of the slums! who would grudge you that harmless and unfailing consolation?

Nor is the "country,"—except in strictly limited quantities,—such an unfailing consolation to the children of the poor, as some would have us imagine. (That it is such a priceless advantage to their health is, no doubt, partly owing to the fact that it is generally associated with good and wholesome food.) The children like the "real country" for a day or two;—afterwards, they are too often conscious of slight boredom. At first, they delight in the fact that "it's so green all rarnd,—right to the sky,—with no roads, and no walls,—and no trespsin boards,—and no pleecemen;" but these joys have their limitations,—and, after a fortnight's holiday,—even poor slum children are generally glad to get back home. Even in tender youth,—the country is a cult that requires some learning. "The country is dreadful slow,"—a little girl of the great city once remarked with painful frankness,—"no swings, no rahnd-abarts, no penny-ice men, no orgins, no shops, no nothink;—jest a great bare field only." Here, again, is the difference of "the point of view!"

Go into that glittering Armida-Palace, the busy Whitechapel Road, and watch the scene at nightfall. The weather may be cold or mirk; the weather matters little; the skies may be glum and starless, but a galaxy of light, from innumerable gas jets and shop fronts, floods the busy street. Here is, certainly, no lack of life and amusement; the crowd laughs, jostles, and chatters, as if no such thing as care or struggle existed. It is a motley crowd. Handsome dark-eyed Jewesses with floppy hair and long gold earrings; coster girls "on the spree," dressed in their gaudy best; staid couples doing their weekly marketing; here and there a happy family round a stall, eating "winkles" composedly with the help of pins, or demolishing saucerfuls of the savoury cockle; vendors of penny toys; all these, combined with the voluble "patter" of the lively shop-boys, make a veritable pandemonium. Shops are full; barrows of all kinds drive a brisk trade; velvet-cushioned trams ply up and down the big highway, which extends, apparently almost into infinity, up the long Mile End Road. (Tram-lines, in London, seem more or less confined to the uninspiring North and East and their suburbs.) Ugly and uninvigorating enough by day, the streets, by night, invest themselves with mysterious glamour and brightness. Like some murky theatre when the deceiving footlights are lit, this, too, is a "stage illusion," and it is a wise one. For all the East End does its shopping by gaslight; now only it begins to enjoy its day. Seen in such kaleidoscopic glare of light, even the Whitechapel Road has its attractions. Yet through it all one sometimes sees sad sights. Many public-houses dot these thoroughfares, shining like meteors through the nocturnal mists; and here and there, truth to tell, a bevy of red-faced women may be seen through the plate-glass, whose unhappy infants are stationed in shabby perambulators outside; their eyes, by dint of vain straining towards their natural guardians, painfully acquiring that squint that would seem to be the birthright of so many of the London poor.

In strange contrast with the din and bustle of Aldgate and its network of wide streets, are the collegiate buildings of Toynbee Hall, in Commercial Street, close by. This is a curious little oasis in the wilderness, a most unexpected by-way in busy, glaring Whitechapel. To Canon and Mrs. Barnett, who have devoted their lives towards making Toynbee Hall what it is, is due the chief honour for the successful working of this Institution, primarily intended to bring "sweetness and light" into the darkened, unlovely lives of the London poor. The name of Arnold Toynbee, the young and enthusiastic Oxford man and reformer, has been immortalised in this place, the first of the University Settlements in London. Toynbee died young, of overwork and overpressure; in a sense a martyr to his cause; yet the work of this latter-day apostle has already had large results, and his creed has had many followers. To him, dying in his youthful zeal, Tennyson's lines seem specially appropriate:

"So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be,
How know I what had need of thee,
For thou wert strong as thou wert true?
............
"O hollow wraith of dying fame,
Fade wholly, while the soul exults,
And self-infolds the large results
Of force that would have forged a name."

In some ways, Toynbee Hall, and its successive, and kindred institutions, seem like late revivals of the monastic system of the middle ages. Toynbee Hall is a hall in the academic sense,—and shelters successive batches of some twenty residents,—young university men of strong convictions,—who come here both to learn and to teach;—to teach their less fortunate brothers,—to learn how the poor live. At its hospitable door the sick and suffering apply for help and succour; here charity,—charity, too, of the kind that "blesseth him that gives and him that takes,"—is freely given,—without narrow restrictions of sectarianism or dogma—and it does more than this.

For,—unlike the monastic system,—Toynbee Hall is specially devised to help the individual soul of the poor worker in busy London to rise above its often base and mean surroundings. The late Matthew Arnold, in his well-remembered lecture at Toynbee Hall,—taught the possibility of "following the gleam" even in the "gloom" of the East-End,—and of helping Nature, by the aid of books and of art, from sinking under "long-lived pressure of obscure distress." Books and art are great tonics. The ancient monasteries dissuaded,—if anything,—knowledge, and aspiration generally, in the "masses": Toynbee Hall encourages and promotes it; it is thus a physician to the mind even more than to the body. It raises the aims, improves the tastes, and widens the horizons of its disciples; it satisfies the cravings of the poor for better things; but it must first inculcate such cravings. Within its walls the poor and struggling artisan may enjoy concerts, lectures, pictures;—may learn, too, from the best teachers,—and profit by many of the advantages of university life. There are not only lecture-rooms, but reception-rooms,—dining-rooms,—a library;—the latter a much-valued institution in the neighbourhood. Many pleasant social gatherings are held here;—not only of working men,—but also of factory girls,—shop-hands,—pupil-teachers,—who come here,—these latter,—to cast off the "codes" and dry bones of learning, and acquire a little of its warmer, fuller humanity.

Toynbee Hall is not the only place in East London where such works are carried on. Oxford House, Bethnal Green,—and Mansfield House, Canning Town,—are, among others,—institutions more or less of the kind; and the Passmore Edwards Institute, in Tavistock Place, has similar aims. But to Toynbee Hall is due the introduction of yearly loan Exhibitions of good pictures for the East End,—originated by Canon Barnett, and still successfully carried on by his unwearying exertions.

The charms of poetic contrast are always great in London. While standing in a dingy byway of some city church—St. Olave's, Hart Street, or St. Jude's, Whitechapel,—does not the deep music of the organ,—resounding from inside the building,—fill the listener with a strange feeling almost akin to tears? Not even outside a country church is one so affected. Here it seems to bring the calm of Eternity into the fitful fever of the moment. The picturesqueness, alone, of religion, is so great, that, to the determined agnostic London would surely lose half its charm. And who could work among the London poor without, at least, something of the feeling so beautifully expressed in Matthew Arnold's well-known lines?

Toynbee Hall, of course, is of modern design; but there are still many good old-time houses in the East-end,—now deserted and left stranded by the tide of fashion. Of these is Essex House, in the Mile-End-Road, (opposite Burdett-Road), now no longer residential, but used by Mr. Ashbee as the convenient location for his well-known "Guild and School of Handicraft." Built partly by a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, with panelled rooms, oak staircase, and large garden, its solid dignity is well suited to its new and living purpose. Mr. Ashbee,—the founder and moving spirit of the Guild—was himself a worker at Toynbee Hall, where, indeed, in a small "Ruskin class" held in 1886-7, the school had its beginning. So one thing grows out of another, and a sturdy plant sends out its offshoots.

Thus Toynbee Hall, and kindred institutions, show the West-end in the East; now let us turn to the East-end in the West. This is not so difficult to find; "the poor," indeed, "we have always with us," and in some of London's most fashionable streets the saddest sights of all may be seen. Slums of a sort are to be found near most of the fashionable West-end squares; and, even within the precincts of aristocratic Mayfair, the expensive fish-shop in Bond-Street,—where, during long summer days, enormous blocks of ice, tempting to the eye, glitter like some Rajah's diamond,—entertains a motley crew of poor folk on Saturday nights, when it makes a practice of giving away its remaining stock. Bond Street is, in a manner, the "Aldgate High Street" of the fashionable world: here, at four o'clock or so in the afternoon, are to be seen the "gilded youth,"—the dandies of the day;—here the smart world flock for afternoon tea; and here fine ladies walk even unattended, and satisfy, as eagerly as their Whitechapel sisters, their feminine cravings for shop-windows. Who was it who first said that no real woman could ever pass a hat-shop? The truth of this remark may here be attested. The very smartest of motor-cars,—of horses,—of "turn-outs" generally,—may be seen blocking the narrow Piccadilly entrance of this thoroughfare from which deviates as many mysterious byways as from Cheapside itself. Very much sought after are all these tiny streets; indeed, the tide of fashion has been ever faithful to this special part of the metropolis. Did not Swift once write to "Stella," of the neighbouring Bury Street; "I have a first floor, a dining-room and bedroom, at eight shillings a week,—and plaguey dear!"? But,—even considering the vast difference in money value since Swift's day,—we have to pay a good deal more than that now for similar accommodation in this quarter.

But, yet further West, between Bond Street and Hyde Park, are Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, the very focus of fashion, in whose neighbourhood rents rise proportionately. Here, too, are many unexpected and charming byways. Behind the vestry in Mount Street, for instance, in the passage that leads into the church in Farm Street, you might think yourself thousands of miles away from Mayfair. This church in Farm Street,—the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception,—is famous as a Jesuit centre; here it was that Henry Manning, afterwards Cardinal, was "received" on Passion Sunday, 1851.

Other byways there are, too, of a less attractive kind; the byways where dwell the "poor relations," so to speak, of the Aristocracy and the "Smart Set"; the impoverished ladies whose sense of propriety would lead them to dwell even in a wheelbarrow, could that wheelbarrow only be drawn up on the fashionable side of the street! They are "backmewsy" little streets of saddening aspect, such as Dickens's typical "Mews Street, Grosvenor Square," that contained the residence of Mr. Tite Barnacle, with "squeezed houses," each with "a ramshackle bowed front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp waistcoat pocket" ... the house a sort of bottle filled with a strong distillation of mews, so that when the footman opened the door, he "seemed to take the stopper out." Dickens's picture is still a portrait that many will recognise:

"Mews Street, Grosvenor Square, was not absolutely Grosvenor Square itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with lofts over coach-houses inhabited by coachmen's families, who had a passion for drying clothes, and decorating their window-sills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind end of Mews Street; and the same corner contained an establishment much frequented about early morning and twilight, for the purchase of wine-bottles and kitchen-stuff. Punch's shows used to lean against the dead wall in Mews Street, while their proprietors were dining elsewhere; and the dogs of the neighbourhood made appointments to meet in the same locality. Yet there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation; and whenever one of these fearful little coops was to be let (which seldom happened, for they were in great request), the house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence in the most aristocratic part of town, inhabited solely by the élite of the beau monde."

But to the millionaire's dwelling, located at that period in Harley Street, Cavendish-Square, the novelist is hardly more polite:

"Like unexceptionable society" (he says), "the opposing rows of houses in Harley Street were very grim with one another. Indeed, the mansions and their inhabitants were so much alike in that respect, that the people were often to be found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner-tables, in the shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of the way with the dullness of the houses. Everybody knows how like the street the two dinner-rows of people who take their stand by the street will be. The expressionless uniform twenty houses, all to be knocked and rung at in the same form, all approachable by the same dull steps, all fended off by the same pattern of railing, all with the same impracticable fire-escapes, the same inconvenient fixtures in their heads, and everything without exception to be taken at a high valuation—who has not dined with these? The house so drearily out of repair, the occasional bow-window, the stuccoed house, the newly-fronted house, the corner house with nothing but angular rooms, the house with the blinds always down, the house with the hatchment always up, the house where the collector has called for one quarter of an Idea, and found nobody at home—who has not dined with these?"

Dickens, on the whole, is kinder to his thieves' kitchens and debtors' prisons, even to Fagin and his crew; for he allows them, at any rate, to boast occasionally of an "Idea." But the "Smart Set," with the plutocrats and the Merdles, has moved westward since the days of the Early-Victorian novelists; and "Harley Street, Cavendish Square," is now mainly medical.

The smart ladies often seen shopping in Bond Street from neat broughams and landaus, drawn by high-stepping horses, are mainly people whose names figure largely in the so-called "society" papers; their goings and comings, be they aristocratic or theatrical, are all, therefore, carefully noted by the ubiquitous "lady reporter;" terrible fate of the well-known or well-born! But it is an age of advertisement; and who shall say entirely on which side the fault lies? Where these leaders of society shop now, other generations of fair dead ladies, gone "with the snows of yesteryear," have in their turn enjoyed the dear delights of lace, millinery, and jewels. Here the "ladies of St. James's," in the eighteenth century, revelled in their "lutestrings," "dimitys," "paduasoys"; and, to flaunt it over their less fortunate sisters, bought the very newest new thing in turbans. Piccadilly, doubtless, looked a trifle brighter and smarter in those days of less smoke, as befitted the "court end of the town;" and the young "swells" of the day presented a braver array in their laces, ruffles, and knee-breeches. Then, as now, the Holbein-like Gate of St. James's Palace, dignified in sober red-brick, stood sentinel at the bottom of St. James's Street,—the street thus alluded to by Sheridan:

"The Campus Martius of St. James's Street,
Where the beaux' cavalry pace to and fro,
Before they take the field in Rotten Row."

St. James's Street, with all its byways and purlieus, has always been greatly in request for exclusive and smart clubs, as well as for bachelors' lodgings of the luxurious kind. It has also literary associations. St. James's Place, where Addison lived, was also noted for the residence of the old banker-poet Samuel Rogers; this was his home for fifty-five years, and here, at No. 22, he gave his famous "literary breakfasts." Of old the most exclusive gathering in this region was "Almack's," ruled by the famous Lady Jersey, "the seventh heaven of the fashionable world." It is situated in King Street, and is now "Willis's Rooms." St. James's, as a rule, is "exclusive" enough still; but the neighbourhood has in other ways gone through many changes. The great house built by Nash for the Regent,—Carlton House, beyond Pall Mall,—has vanished like Aladdin's Palace, and has left in its place only one big column, a flight of noble steps, and a stately terrace of palatial mansions,—Carlton-House-Terrace, overlooking the Mall. This Phœnix-like spirit of London, ever rising anew on its own ashes, was always dear to Thackeray. Here is one of his inimitable passages on the subject, thrown off at random:

"... I remember peeping through the colonnade at Carlton House, and seeing the abode of the great Prince Regent. I can see yet the Guards pacing before the gates of the place. The place? What place? The palace exists no more than the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. It is but a name now. Where be the sentries who used to salute as the Royal chariots drove in and out? "The chariots, with the kings inside, have driven to the realms of Pluto; the tall Guards have marched into darkness, and the echoes of their drums are rolling in Hades." Where the palace once stood, a hundred little children are paddling up and down the steps to St. James's Park. A score of grave gentlemen are taking their tea at the Athenæum Club; as many grisly warriors are garrisoning the United Service Club opposite. Pall Mall is the great social Exchange of London now—the mart of news, of politics, of scandal, of rumour—the English forum, so to speak, where men discuss the last despatch from the Crimea, the last speech of Lord Derby, the next move of Lord John. And, now and then, to a few antiquarians, whose thoughts are with the past rather than with the present, it is a memorial of old times and old people, and Pall Mall is our Palmyra. Look! About this spot, Tom of Ten Thousand was killed by Königsmarck's gang. In that red house Gainsborough lived, and Culloden Cumberland, George III.'s uncle. Yonder is Sarah Marlborough's palace, just as it stood when that termagant occupied it. At 25, Walter Scott used to live; at the house, now No. 79, and occupied by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, resided Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn, comedian. How often has Queen Caroline's chair issued from under yonder arch! All the men of the Georges have passed up and down the street. It has seen Walpole's chariot and Chatham's sedan; and Fox, Gibbon, Sheridan, on their way to Brookes's; and stately William Pitt stalking on the arm of Dundas; and Hanger and Tom Sheridan reeling out of Raggett's; and Byron limping into Wattier's; and Swift striding out of Bury Street; and Mr. Addison and Dick Steele, both perhaps a little the better for liquor; and the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York clattering over the pavement; and Johnson counting the posts along the streets, after dawdling before Dodsley's window; and Horry Walpole hobbling into his carriage, with a gimcrack just bought out at Christie's; and George Selwyn sauntering into White's."—Thackeray: The Four Georges, p. 72.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Pall Mall was a pretty suburban promenade, and its "sweet shady side," sung by the poets, was really no misnomer, as a row of elms fringed it, both north and south. And it is still an aristocratic region, despite the "business" air that has of late invaded it. Of the people you meet here,—elderly gentlemen with nothing, perhaps, very remarkable about them, to outward view;—or smart young men, with well-polished boots and hats, and faultless dress-coats,—it is safe to say that a fair number will have distinguished themselves in one way or another; either in the working of their country's government, or in the fighting of their country's battles. But, here as elsewhere, England is uncommunicative, and you may pass angels unawares.

Just behind Pall Mall is the aristocratic St. James's Square—already, alas! invaded by the modern builder:

"She shall have all that's fine and fair,
And ride in a coach to take the air,
And have a house in St. James's Square,"—

—runs the old ballad. Though St. James's Square now contains a fair sprinkling of Government and other offices,—yet its clientèle is still somewhat ducal. Nevertheless, this Square, too, recalls something of the seamy side of life. "What," says Lord Rosebery, referring to London's many associations, "can be less imposing, or less interesting in themselves,—than the railings of St. James's Square? Yet, you cannot touch those railings—hideous as they are and dull as are the houses that surround them—without thinking that Johnson and Savage, hungry boys, starved by their kind mother, London, who attracted men of letters to her, walked round that square one summer night and swore they would die for their country."

Yes,—this, in some way, seems "the best of all possible worlds,"—and London, in such surroundings, the best of all possible cities to live in. Yet, here, too, the East is still present in the West. Round the corner, as I gaze, comes a pitiful group,—a tawdry woman, her voice raucous and suggestive of gin, holding by the hand two children, a boy and a girl,—all singing, or making believe to sing, in chorus:

"'Ark! ar ark, my sowl! Angelic songs are swellin',
From Hearth's green fields—and Hoceant's way-be shore—
'Ark, ar-ark,—"

Alas! the notes are hardly suggestive of angelic visitants. The chubby little boy is crying, the tears making streaky marks down his dirty little face. "I'm so cowld, so cowld, mammy," "'Owld yer row!"—admonishes his sister, in the intervals of her husky accompaniment.... The sodden voice of the mother is so terrible that I am moved to give her a shilling to go away and remove her poor suffering babies.... But,—at the angle of Waterloo Place,—another phantom is stationed; a wretchedly-clothed creature, evidently on the look-out for a job. He might himself be an incarnation of Famine. His cheeks are hollow and cadaverous; his eyes are dulled and hopeless; he shivers in the bleak raw December air;—in the "best of all possible worlds,—the richest of all possible cities".... The mere "cab-horse's charter" is not for such as he! Ungrateful country, that deals so ill with her children, giving them too often "stones for bread!"

"If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the company—feasting and fancy-free—if, pale with sickness, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body, they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them—would only a passing glance, a passing thought be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real relations of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the intervention of the house wall between the table and the sick-bed—by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are indeed all that separate the merriment from the misery."

It is an effective contrast. But, perhaps the most vivid and pathetic sketch of the Submerged of the Great City is that of John Davidson's weird and haunting ballad: "The Loafer":

The old Abbey of Westminster, is, indeed, in itself an epitome of English history. Elsewhere in London, you must dig and delve for it, study and reconstruct; here, you have it all together, a chain in a manner unbroken, from Edward the Confessor to the latest of our Hanoverian Kings, crowned here, so lately and so splendidly, in the place of his fathers.

The church has, in a manner, been founded many times; by tradition, by rebuilding, by frequent restoration and enlargement. The earliest church, or temple, on this ancient site is, indeed, almost lost in the semi-fabulous mists of early history. To all famous fanes, the after-years have a tendency to ascribe legendary and miraculous beginnings; thus, the magic haze that surrounds the primitive church of the doubtful Saxon King Lucius is hardly less than that covering the Temple of Apollo, the Sun-god, said to exist here in Roman times. At any rate, it is clear that on this favoured spot, once the little sandy peninsula of "Thorney Island," was an early sanctuary and settlement, both Roman and Briton. In King Sebert's time the mists of antiquity lift, but still slightly. Sebert, King of the East-Saxons, was, early in the seventh century, the traditionary founder of a church here, dedicated to St. Peter. According to the story, Sebert, just returned from a Roman pilgrimage, was about to have his church consecrated by the bishop, Mellitus; when, one evening, a poor Saxon fisher, Edric, who was watching his nets along the shore, saw, on the opposite river bank, a gleaming light, and, approaching it in his boat, found a venerable man who desired to be ferried across the stream. There, the mysterious stranger landed, and proceeded to the church, where, transfigured with light, and attended by hosts of glittering angels, he consecrated it, being, indeed, no other than St. Peter himself:

The chronicle relates the story thus:

"Know, O Edric," said the stranger, while the fisherman's heart glowed within him, "know that I am Peter. I have hallowed the church myself. To-morrow I charge thee that thou tell these things to the Bishop, who will find a sign and token in the church of my hallowing. And for another token, put forth again upon the river, cast thy nets, and thou shalt receive so great a draught of fishes that there will be no doubt left in thy mind. But give one-tenth to this my holy church."

The story continues that Bishop Mellitus, on hearing Edric's miraculous tale, changed the name of the place from Thorney Isle to West Minster.

The tomb of the first traditionary founder of St. Peter's church of Westminster is still shown in the Abbey to-day, as it has been shown ever since the time of its erection. Through all the vicissitudes of the Abbey, its many alterations and restorations, this early relic has always been treated carefully and with respect. The King of the East-Saxons sleeps in peace in the choir, with his wife Ethelgoda and his sister Ricula, first of a long line of kings and potentates.

But if Sebert was the traditional founder of the Abbey, Edward the Confessor was, unquestionably, its real founder. And, for that matter, the legends that surround the mysterious Sebert still linger, like a halo, round the Confessor's memory; he who was, we are told, so saintly, that being one day at mass in the ancient minster, he saw "the Saviour appear as a child, bright and pure as a spirit." Truly, a picturesque age to live in! The rebuilding of the Confessor's church was, as in the later time of Rahere, the outcome of a vision, and of a direct message from the saint. Edward, said St. Peter, must rebuild the ancient minster of Thorney. Edward rebuilt it, laying the foundation stone in 1049, and naming it "the Collegiate Church of St. Peter of Westminster." It was the work of the King's life, and it was only consecrated eight days before his death. Of the Confessor's chapel and monastery all that now remains is the present "Chapel of the Pyx," with portions of the Westminster School Buildings and of the walls of the South Cloister. For Henry III., the Abbey's second founder, who had "a rare taste for building" pulled down, in 1245, most of his predecessor's work, and made the splendid miracle-working shrine that contains the relics of the royal saint. But it was Henry VII., in 1502, who was the great builder and transformer of the Abbey. To him we owe the fine perpendicular chapel called by his name, "the most beautiful chapel in the world," the one building that impresses, at first sight, every visitor to London. Westminster Abbey, as we see it now, is probably in externals much as Henry VII. left it, except for the addition of Wren's two western towers, and "the fact that in the middle ages it was a magnificent apex to a royal palace," surrounded "by a train of subordinate offices and buildings, and with lands extending to the present Oxford Street, Fleet Street, and Vauxhall."

Yet, without any of its former palatial accessories, is not the gray fret-work of Henry VIIth's chapel, as it breaks on the delighted vision of the traveller down Whitehall, an ever-renewed joy and wonder? To Henry Tudor we owe the union of the houses of York and Lancaster; yet we remember him far more by this, the chapel that he has given us for all time. Truly, he too must have had "a rare taste in building!" "It is to the exaltation of the building art," says Mr. Ruskin, in an eloquent passage, "that we owe:

—"those vaulted gates ... those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations. All else for which the builders sacrificed, has passed away—all their living interests, and aims, and achievements. We know not for what they laboured, and we see no evidence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority, happiness—all have departed, though bought by many a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life and their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honours, and their errors; but they have left us their adoration."

But, apart from the beauty of its architecture, apart from the associations and traditions of its early history, apart from its honour as the place of coronations, the feeling that every true Englishman has for the Abbey of Westminster must necessarily be strong; for it represents to him not only the essential spirit of his mother-city; it is also, in a sense, his national Valhalla,

—"place of tombs,
Where lie the mighty bones of ancient men."—

Here, in this "cathedral close of Westminster," is his true fatherland. This, he may say, is his national Holy of Holies; the sacred spot:

"Wo meine Traüme wandeln gehn,
Wo meine Todten aufersteh'n."

Here he may feel all the reverence, all the love for his country, that is ever the birthright of the true citizen. For, not only kings, queens, and nobles, but also the great and mighty in art, science, literature, are buried within this narrow space. It is England's Temple of Fame, her crowing glory of a life of honour and merit. The "immortal dead" are thus in their death brought near to each one of us, and become part of our special family. They are our national inheritance.

Westminster Abbey is "the silent meeting-place of the dead of eight centuries," the "great temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried." Death is ever the great peacemaker. Round the mediæval shrine of Edward the Confessor, in its faded and rifled splendour, lie, in a closely-joined circle, the peaceful Tombs of the Kings; sturdy Plantagenets, their warfare ended, the features of their effigies composed in an eternal calm. They sleep well, after life's fitful fever! In Henry VIIth's chapel, Mary and Elizabeth, sisters of bitter hate and strange destiny, rest together in a contracted sepulchre, admitting of none other occupant but they two. "The sisters are at one; the daughter of Catherine of Aragon and the daughter of Anne Boleyn repose in peace at last." On their monument is the striking inscription: an inscription placed there by James I.; "closing," said Dean Stanley, "the long war of the English Reformation;" "Regno consortes et urnâ, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis." And those great statesmen of a later age, Pitt and Fox, their life-long rivalry ended, rest in the north transept, dying in the same year, and buried close together:

"Here—taming thought to human pride—
The mighty chiefs sleep side by side.
Drop upon Fox's grave the tear,
'Twill trickle to his rival's bier;
O'er Pitt's the mournful requiem sound,
And Fox's shall the notes rebound.
The solemn echo seems to cry—
'Here let their discord with them die.'"

The figure of William Pitt, Lord Chatham, in parliamentary robes, his arm outstretched as if speaking, rises high above the surrounding monuments:

"High over those venerable graves," says Macaulay, "towers the stately monument of Chatham, and from above, his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl defiance at her foes."

In another splendid passage, Macaulay describes the later burial of the son near the father:

"The grave of Pitt had been made near to the spot where his great father lay, near also to the spot where his great rival was soon to lie.... Wilberforce, who carried the banner before the hearse, described the awful ceremony with deep feeling. As the coffin descended into the earth, he said, the eagle face of Chatham from above seemed to look down with consternation into the dark house which was receiving all that remained of so much power and glory."

"The silence of death," says Dean Stanley, "breathes here the lesson which the tumult of life hardly suffered to be heard."

As, then, the Appian Way was to the Romans, so is Westminster Abbey to us, our "Highway of Tombs." As the stranger walks along the vast Nave and the Transepts, he passes through a veritable City of the Dead, commemorated here by every kind of monument, statue, bust, tablet, cenotaph, tomb. Here are now no more the simple tombs and effigies of the earliest time, no more the rich, imposing magnificence of the mediæval shrines, but a later efflorescence of sculpture and ornament, an efflorescence differing as widely from the severity of former ages, as the laudatory epitaphs differ from the simplicity and humility of the early inscriptions. Justice and Mercy, Neptune and Britannia, cherubs and clouds, are generally very painfully in evidence, and in their vast size and depressing ubiquity testify to the false taste of their day. Nor are the monuments always deserved. "Some day," said Carlyle, cynically, "there will be a terrible gaol-delivery in Westminster Abbey!" The worst of such theatrical sculpture is, also, that it always takes up so much room; we, in our day, should often be glad of the space of one cloudlet,—of one unnecessary virtue,—for the modest perpetuation of a great man's memory. Who now recalls the merits of the forgotten magnates of past ages? but Dickens's humble grave-stone is ever freshly tended, bright with geranium or violet. Ruskin's small tablet and bas-relief must hang in a dark, unnoticed, corner, and Tennyson's bust is relegated to a pillar of Poet's Corner. And what is left, one may ask, of our National Valhalla, for the great names of a future age?

The solemn dignity of the Confessor's Chapel, and of Henry VIIth's beautiful chapel behind it, have, after the crude monuments of the Nave, all the calm of a secluded byway after the clamour of a noisy street.

Westminster Abbey is full of beautiful pictures. On a sunny day, especially, the play of light and shade on its pillars, the fretted tracery of its interlaced arches, the fine harmony of its proportions, the golden, mellowing, subdued light that enters through its "rose" windows, the colour of its many tombs and rich marbles, that, on a day of London winter, so beautifully harmonises with the whole, may well tempt many an artist. To gain the full glory of the long aisles in their aerial perspective, the Abbey should be seen from the far end of the Nave. Everywhere is beauty; but perhaps one of the most lovely "bits" in the church is that furnished by the three canopied tombs of Henry III.'s family,—the tombs of Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, Countess Aveline, his wife, and Aymer de Valence. These three tombs make a charming picture from the Sacrarium, where they stand; viewed, too, from the aisle just beneath them, two of them tower up grandly, to their full height; the third, however, that of Aveline, is hidden from the aisle by an ugly eighteenth-century monument. (Truly, the eighteenth century has much to answer for!) The lofty pinnacles of these tombs, the richness of their sculptured foliage and crockets, and the calmness of their supported effigies, are very impressive. Among other strikingly picturesque views is that of the small chapel, or rather, doorway, of St. Erasmus, dating from Richard II.'s time, a low arch supported by clustered pillars; and also that of the splendid "Chantry of Henry V.," towering at the entrance to Henry VIIth's Chapel, above the royal circle of tombs on either side. Over the Arch that canopies Henry's tomb, (an arch in the shape of the letter "H,") is the iron bar with the king's shield, saddle and helmet,—the helmet which we would fain for poetry's sake, think to be

—"that casque that did affright the air at Agincourt,"

—but which was, probably, merely a tilting-helmet made for the funeral. There is a sad humanity about these blackened accoutrements of the dead, standing out against the golden half-light of the dimly-seen chapel beyond, hanging so long in their lofty position as to seem a part of the Abbey itself. Have they not, before now, appealed to the imagination of many a Westminster school-boy, sitting below in the choir, and set him wondering about those old Plantagenets and Tudors, who seem here so much more alive and human than in the dull pages of a history book?

The best tombs of the Abbey are only free and open to inspection on Mondays and Tuesdays within certain hours; on all other days, they are locked up, and people are only "taken round" them at stated times and under supervision. On Mondays and Tuesdays there is, mostly, a good assembly of sightseers; and, whether one choses a free day, full of people, or whether one rather elects to be taken round on a sixpenny day in custody, in either case one inevitably loses much of the charm and feeling of the beautiful old church and its associations. On free days, boys have a tendency to clatter distractingly up and down the wooden steps that lead to the Confessor's Chapel, with other diversions natural to the juvenile mind; on sixpenny days, you go in and out with the crowd in a depressing "queue," while each chapel in turn is unlocked and its monuments explained in a sad monotone. No other arrangement, no doubt, is possible; yet, who could penetrate to the soul of the Abbey under such conditions as these? It is perhaps not unnatural that the vergers, who have performed the office so often, should feel a certain satiety in the process, and that they should wish to hurry the visitor through the chapels as quickly and perfunctorily as may be; and yet, how charming would it be to spend a long afternoon here, in study or enjoyment, undisturbed! In an unwashed and noisy crowd, a crowd which seems to imagine that the Tombs of the Kings are a species of Waxworks, who can think, or enjoy, or remember? Moreover, when one is, so to speak, "in custody," one must always be very careful to do nothing which may draw down on one's self the suspicion of the custodian. In this connexion one is tempted to recall the story told of a certain too-conscientious verger in one of our provincial cathedrals. A devout visitor knelt down at an altar-tomb; an action for which the said verger promptly reprimanded him. "I was only praying," murmured the visitor, rising abashed. "Oh, that can't be allowed," said the verger; "we can't let people pray about wherever they like; that would never do."

In Westminster Abbey they are hardly so particular; and yet, something of this same sense of restriction the reverent visitor to the ancient edifice also experiences. His spirit recoils from locked entrance gates and tours of perfunctory inspection, and yearns for but one hour of the "bliss of solitude," to invoke, if not the shades of the mighty dead, at least something of the feeling that clings round their memorial chapels. It is this feeling that Froude has so well described: "Between us and the old English," he says in an eloquent passage, "there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."

And now for the other side of the picture. I was once, on a "sixpenny day," in the north aisle of Henry VIIth's chapel, admiring the quaint cradle-tomb of that "royal rosebud" of three days old,—Princess Sophia,—and pondering over that strange curse of Stuarts and Tudors, when up came a couple, 'Arry and 'Arriet, of the usual cockney honey-mooning type. They were evidently "doing" the London monuments in style, and eschewed free days. The bride seemed tired and somewhat apathetic; she evidently had to be kept severely up to the mark.

"Funny little nipper," said the young man peeping into the cradle: "It's a won'erful big child for three days old," said the bride, with some faint show of interest; and, "my! how silly it is dressed! only fancy, a cap like that there for a byby!" Then they turned to Queen Elizabeth's effigy: "I don't like the looks of 'er," said the lady, with something between a shudder and a giggle: "I come over jes' now so faint," she continued, her pink colour fading: "it's 'ardly' 'elthy in 'ere with all these corpses, is it?.... Wax-works is much nicer; they don't give yer the creeps so. Let's go and 'ave a 'bus ride, an' give the old Johnny the slip. I think we've 'ad our sixpennorth." So they went, but alas! they had left me their desecration.

Strange, indeed, are Fate's ironies! Queen Elizabeth and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, rest in the two side aisles of Henry VIIth's chapel in stately tombs, much resembling one another, erected, with praiseworthy impartiality, to his "dearest mother" and his "dear sister," by King James I. In the Stuart vault, close to the unhappy Queen of Scots, is buried Lady Arabella Stuart, "childe of woe"; that poor prisoner of the Tower, separated from her loved and just-wedded husband and kept by her cousin James I. in durance vile, till "her reason left her," and she died. Even in death her disgrace followed her, when, for fear of being thought too respectful to one "dying out of royal favour," the authorities dared not even provide her poor body with an adequate coffin! Poor "Ladie Arbell!" Of all the tragedies of English history, none are sadder or more cruel than hers, or reflect, more vividly, the inhumanity of the time.

The interior of Henry VIIth's Chapel,—in its darkened glory of golden light, with its fretted roof, its "walls wrought into universal ornament," its many statues and sculptures, and contrasted dark oak choir stalls, with the banners of their owners, the Knights of the Bath, hanging overhead,—is very fine. In the centre of the chapel is the magnificent tomb of Henry VII., the third founder of the Abbey, who, with much of the feeling of the men who built the Pyramids, determined this as the splendid mausoleum of his race. The monument, enclosed by a screen, or "closure," of gilt copper, is by Torregiano. Here, with Henry, is buried his wife, Elizabeth of York, in marriage with whom the king finally united the York and Lancaster cause. Hither was brought in state, in 1502, the body of this last Queen of the House of York, dead at twenty-seven, her waxen effigy, with dishevelled hair and Royal robes, lying outside her coffin: