PR 
 
 5249 
 
 R6 
 
 E6 
 
 1904 
 
 MAIN 
 
 'si 
 
GIFT OF 
 Miss J. Rov/botham 
 
THEE 
 
 OF 
 
 O N D O 
 
 BY 
 
 ROWBOTHAM, 
 
 HE MODERN HOMER, 
 

 W:^^ '.:.'■ ,(y^''l 
 
The Epic OF London 
 
 AN EPIC POEM IN TEN CANTOS 
 AND TWENTY RHAPSODIES, 
 
 BY 
 
 ROWBOTHAM, THE MODERN HOMER 
 
 (The Rev. J. F. Rowbotham, M.A. Oxon., D.D., 
 Vicar of Sutton Cheney.) 
 
 / •JC77/ sing of the great city of London 
 and I icill steep it in starlight. 
 
 Written 1894, 1900 and 1904. 
 
 London : 
 W. & G. FoYLE, Ltd., 121, Charing Cross Road, W.C. 2. 
 

 EH 
 
 
 
 ^^^^L\ 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 ^^^^^^^B ^fl^l^^H 
 
 (^ 
 
 ^(nU^ MJi'AyV^^ 0{om4v44^^ 
 
 o^ 
 
 i^' 
 
 Ol/y^*^ 
 
 .C>i-eyXY^a^C^i^'^U/LL \ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 The Cantos. 
 
 Canto I.— The Circle of Fashion ... ... Page 1 
 
 II. — The Circle of Business ... ... 15 
 
 III. — The Circle of Business (The Traffic) 24 
 
 IV. — The Circle of Business (The Markets) 30 
 
 V. — The Circle of Labour ... ... 38 
 
 VI. — The Circle of Pleasure ... ... 46 
 
 VII.— The Circle of Vice 5S 
 
 VIII. — The Circle of Crime ... ... 67 
 
 IX.— The Circle of Poverty 70 
 
 X. — The Eternal Sleep of London ... S2, 
 
 London in the year 4000 ... ... 87 
 
 The Rhapsodies. 
 
 I.— The Parks 4 
 
 II. — The Coaching Club ... ... 6 
 
 III. — A Fantasia on the Opera ... ... 8 
 
 IV. — An At Home 13 
 
 V. — Business in the City ... ... 17 
 
 VI. — A Fantasia on a Large London Draper's 17 
 
 VII. — A Fantasia on the Morning Trains and 
 
 Traffic 24 
 
 VIII. — A Rhapsody on Covent Garden 32 
 
 IX. — A Rhapsody on Smithfield ... 35 
 
 X. — A Rhapsody on Labour ... ... 40 
 
 XI. — The Diamond Cutters of Hatton Garden 45 
 
 XII. — A Rhapsody on Pleasure and Champagne 48 
 
 XIII. — The Rhapsody (continued) ... 50 
 
 XIV. — A Ballet at the Empire ... 56 
 
 XV. — The Song of London ... ... 58 
 
 XVI.— The Procession in Regent Street 61 
 
 XVII. — A Rhapsody on Poverty ... 70 
 
 XVIII. — A Lyric on London Mud ... 75 
 
 XIX. — An Elegy on a Pawnbroker's ... 77 
 
 XX. — The Cursing of London ... 96 
 
 The Preface ... ... ... I. 
 
 607168 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 This poem has had an exentful history. On the eve 
 of its pubHcation, the whole edition disappeared, and my 
 utmost efforts have failed to recover one single copy. 
 This was about twenty or thirty years ago, and my 
 mortification was so extreme that I gave up all idea of 
 ever producing the epic at all. It would certainly ne\'er 
 have seen the light, had not my attention been called to 
 a series of unblushing plagiarisms wliich from that time 
 forward began to circulate. These were most notice- 
 able in relation to the sensational Canto containing the 
 Prophecy, in which the future of London in the year 
 4000 is depicted. Passages and phrases by the hun- 
 dred have been pilfered froni this source. 
 
 For this reason I have resob.ed to publish the 
 poem. But I must needs offer it to the public as 
 " London in the Later Victorian Age," for the years 
 have rolled by and much has changed since it was 
 first written. 
 
THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 CANTO L 
 
 As on the journey of my life I passed, 
 From darkness coming, unto darkness bound, 
 I found myself amid a city vast. 
 Mortals in millions compassed me around ; 
 A unit 'mong their millions I was found. 
 As one who, ages since, has joined the dead, 
 And mid the myriad myriads under ground 
 He lieth nameless, undistinguished : 
 So was I 'mid the swarms o'erwhelming, round me spread. 
 
 This city has no walls, wherewith to keep 
 Its teeming populace within confined. 
 Yet whoso entereth its purlieus deep 
 Rarely returns, e'en if he have the mind; 
 But by its very vastness is enshrined. 
 And made, despite his best desires, to stay. 
 If path be open, still he lags behind — 
 Willing to go, yet alway saying, 'Nay,' 
 And doomed for life amid the mighty maze to stray. 
 
 And whoso entereth those purlieus drear 
 Seeth no more green grass nor verdant trees ; 
 No more the feathered songsters doth he hear 
 Piping on sprays their pretty melodies ; 
 Nor listens to the lark amid the leas 
 Trilling its descant in the morning dew ; 
 Nor smells the breath of May, nor balmy breeze. 
 All these, 'tis soon as if he never knew. 
 He enters London ; and he bids such joys adieu. 
 
^ THE EPIC QF LONDON. 
 
 He bids adieu to light and air and sky, 
 To deep tranquillity, unruffled rest, 
 Nay, e'en to silence doth he bid good bye, 
 Silence, for weary men of boons the best ;' 
 And if there be still other joys as blessed,' 
 Or yet more blessfed in their total sum, 
 He casts them off, and what he once possessed 
 Exchanging now for bustle, noise and hum, 
 London he enters, ne'er from London forth to come. 
 
 Ann, who with me hast walked the weary streets. 
 Hast faced the wind, hast braved the bitter cold,' 
 Ann, whose sweet name my fainting spirit greets, 
 Bidding me muster courage, and be bold 
 The secrets of great London to unfold, 
 And carry to the height my arduous lay, — 
 Wander with me the causeways, as of old, 
 Pace the drear streets at eve and morning grey. 
 And as thou wert in times of yore, so be to-day. 
 
 O sweetest saviour of a ruined life. 
 My Mentor mild, kind friend, and comrade dear, 
 O best beloved companion, more than wife, 
 Since that sweet title may not meet thy ear, — 
 Ne'er could it make thee unto me more dear — 
 As thou hast oft preserved me from rue, 
 So to my aid I now invoke thee here. 
 Conjure up scenes long vanished from the view. 
 And bring all London to my eyes.which we roamed through 
 
 Oh ! what a world and what a city this, 
 Where we two wandered in the days gone by, 
 Where we knew Avearing sorrow, roseate bliss. 
 Perils, distress, beneath its leaden sky, 
 Oft 'neath the yoke of galling slavery, 
 With little joy our woeful lives to cheer, 
 Spectators mere of others' luxury — 
 Still wandering hand in hand, in doubt and fear. 
 Amid an endless world monotonous and drear. 
 
 Houses on houses, houses without end. 
 Streets upon streets, and square imposed on square, 
 Pavements and roads and thoroughfares that trend 
 In multitudinous mazes everywhere. 
 Teeming with populace beyond compare — 
 Such is the town, so vast. So huge it lies. 
 The folk, who dwell in one great quarter there. 
 Ne'er of the next the greatness realise, 
 And marvel but at what lies open to their eyes. 
 
THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Yet quarter upon quarter vast abuts, 
 Town upon town ; cities on cities loom ; 
 One London on another London juts ; 
 Londons lie stretching to the crack of doom, 
 And yet to all great London giveth room. 
 Such huge circumference its circuit wins, 
 Within its vast and overswelling womb 
 Lie sixty JNIanchesters and six Berlins, [sins. 
 
 \\'ith all their crimes, their crowds, their sorrows and their 
 
 Too I have heard that all the cities great, 
 Which have on Europe's pleasant plains their home, 
 Could within London be incorporate — 
 Paris, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Rome, 
 And gay Vienna on the Danube's foam, 
 All could ensconce in London's teeming womb ; 
 Could raise their roofs and many a rounded dome ; 
 Their total populace they could entomb 
 Complete in London : yet in London would be room. 
 
 When first I came this mighty town unto, 
 I by the parks did spend my careless days ; 
 Sadness or solitude I never knew. 
 I basked in ceaseless sunshine, and its rays 
 Made all things round me wear a happy face. 
 A fairer, lovelier spot than London town 
 I ne'er opined could on the earth find place. 
 Here buried in delight I sat me down, 
 And did in wassail and in song my senses drown. 
 
 But lo ! at length clouds overcast the sky, 
 And from the pleasant parks and their purlieus 
 I passed into a busy road hard by 
 Of many traders and of many Jews, 
 W^hose eager avarice did me amuse. 
 As all day long, from early morn till night, 
 They trafficked, fearing much their gains to lose, 
 Which seemed alone to bring them dear delight ; 
 For all things else besides they scorned and flouted quite. 
 
 Then went I thence, and to another road 
 In London South of Thames I did me hie. 
 'Twixt Kennington and Brixton 'twas bestowed — 
 A shabby yet genteel locality, 
 Where faded gentlemen might perdu lie. 
 And 'mong the faded gentlemen was I, 
 Now reconciled to my humility. 
 And o'er a huckster's shop and next the sky 
 Sporting with music and Avith epic poetry. 
 
THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Thence driv'n by want and penury, I turned 
 My steps to the inhospitable East, 
 Where suffering's saddest lessons best are learned — 
 Where famine, nakedness, and life diseased 
 Stalk in gaunt shapes abroad ; where one would least. 
 If he could choose his portion, care to be ; 
 Where squalor, filth, crime, dirt have never ceased 
 To spread in ocean round, and Charity 
 Would seek with one clear drop to cleanse the turbid sea. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF FASHION. 
 
 But meanwhile that sad fate not yet was mine, — 
 I basked in sunshine in the careless West, 
 Where skies are ever blue, suns ever shine, 
 W-^here men are proudest, women loveliest, 
 Where pleasure, wealth, ease, elegance, and rest, 
 Spread their voluptuous dominion — 
 A world of joy, a Paradise confessed. 
 Here did I walk, while endless sunshine shone. 
 And little recked the future as I sauntered on. 
 
 THE PARKS. 
 
 The parks with green are glancing. 
 The leaflets light are dancing. 
 
 And summer skies 
 
 In glory rise 
 Upon the fair horizon. 
 The horses feet are prancing, 
 The carriages advancing. 
 
 And many a fair 
 
 Doth take the air. 
 Whom colours gay bedizen. 
 
 In silks and satins gaily, 
 In dainty toilettes daily, 
 
 In pink and green. 
 
 In creamy sheen. 
 In orange and vermilion — 
 Like rainbows' shining shimmer. 
 So gaudily they glimmer ; 
 
 As fair their hue 
 
 As skyey blue, 
 Which doth them all pavilion. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF FASHIQN. 
 
 What piospect in the distance, 
 As in a Hnked persistence 
 
 In endless files 
 
 And mazy aisles 
 The carriages come gliding ! 
 Or in a concourse blending 
 Of cavalcades unending, 
 
 Adown the Row 
 
 Brave figures go, 
 On prancing steeds a-riding ! 
 
 Oft did I walk in that enchanting park, 
 And mingle with the great pedestrian throng 
 Who with light step and many a gay remark 
 And nods of recognition move along. 
 And words of greeting passed the crowd among, 
 And gay retort and graceful compliment. 
 Trilled courteously from many a courtly tongue- 
 All trifles light as air, and with intent 
 But to beguile the hour with harmless merriment. 
 
 And now, as on I roamed, a very sea 
 Of many a waving sunshade, plumaged hat. 
 Rustling and tossing soft, encircled me. 
 On lines of chairs reclining ladies sat, 
 Indulging in the luxury of chat. 
 While gentry from Belgravia and Pall Mall 
 Listening, with languid interest thereat. 
 Caressed their canes as if they loved them well. 
 I take a proffered chair — 1 sink amidst the swell. 
 
 And thus a gentlemen, who, at my side 
 And within earshot, offered sage remark : 
 "Our morning hours we pass all summertide 
 In dolce farniente in the Park. 
 W^e breakfast ( and we rise not with the lark) 
 And then we languish here till luncheon-time. 
 Again we come to ride or drive till dark. 
 'Tis not a life in any way sublime. 
 Yet 'tis the pink of life of England at its prime." 
 
 And thus a lady talking to a friend. 
 Who by her sat amid the brilliant throng : — 
 "What swarms of petty subjects without end 
 Buzz through our puzzled brains and rush along 
 Art, Fashion, Science, Politics, and Song ! 
 Yet two things only interest our sex, 
 
THE EPIC OF LONDON, 
 
 If we may credit Guy de Maupassant — 
 L' Amour, L' Enfant — all others but perplex. 
 If so, with other things in vain ourselves we vex. 
 
 But far away a thickening of the crowd 
 Around the Drive where equipages go, 
 Attracts our eyes. And one remarks aloud, 
 "It is the Coaching Club, who meet, I know 
 They very soon will 'tool' around the Row. 
 Come — if our lazy limbs can crawl so far, 
 Come let us cross the Park at saunter slow, 
 That we may see whoe'er the drivers are, 
 And if their gallant teams be nigh upon a par." 
 
 THE COACHING CLUB. 
 
 Pawning and stamping, 
 Their bright bits champing. 
 There they stand, 
 A peerless four-in-hand — 
 Four royal greys 
 Beyond all praise 
 For fair proportion and for symmetry of build. 
 While behind. 
 O'er them inclined 
 Their drived sits enthroned, 
 A whip renowned, 
 Who with the reins between his fingers 
 
 Soothly lingers 
 Till the sign is given for departing 
 At the hour of starting ; 
 For his team 
 Is to lead the stream 
 Of coaches in the rear. 
 Who in long rank appear 
 
 Till lost to sight 
 In distance infinite. 
 Down shines the sun in floods of gold 
 Upon the gallantest array 
 Of horses and of coaches gay 
 That the world could e'er behold. 
 Off! They are off! In one long line — 
 
 'Tis a sight divine. 
 As they go gliding, as they go wheeling. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF FASHIQN, 
 
 One coach after another steahng, 
 Like coihng snakes, whose supple length 
 Coils and twines with pliant strength : 
 So coil the coaches in the sun, 
 Bending and wheeling as they run — 
 Bending and wheeling, wheeling and bending, 
 Their way wending 
 Round the Drive, 
 Like things alive ; 
 Rolling in a glittering band 
 Through the crowds on either side who stand, 
 Four-in-hand after four-in-hand ; 
 Till they reach the gate at last, 
 Out of which they now have passed 
 Into the town around. 
 
 Haply bound 
 For Richmond or for Kew, 
 To roll through many an avenue 
 And country lane 
 In pompous train. 
 And back to London town at eve 
 Their winding way to weave. 
 
 After the Park to dinner ; and to dine 
 Amid a blaze of light at tables piled 
 With all the meats and delicacies fine, 
 At which the greediest gluttony e'er smiled : — 
 With beasts of chase, with creatures tame and wild, 
 With fowl and game, in pastry built or boiled 
 Or from the spit ; with rarest fish, beguiled 
 From stream or freshet, or in net encoiled 
 With which wet fishermen through midnight sea have 
 toiled. 
 
 The plate in proud profusion gleaming clear. 
 Of massive silver or of ruddy gold. 
 Glows on the board, and rivals the good cheer 
 In costly excellence. The vintage old. 
 From whence the precious wine of price untold 
 Was pressed, and stored in tuns of mightiest size, 
 Thence to be drawn, and but to magnates sold — 
 Burns in the cups, and makes the spirits rise, 
 The colour mantle, and the flash inflame the eyes. 
 
 Meanwhile the flowers which from the ceiling laugh, 
 Or deck the table with the rainbow's bloom, 
 As costly as the costly wine they quaff — 
 Choicest exotics — add their soft perfume 
 
THE EPIC OF LONDON, 
 
 To all the sensuous pleasures of the room. 
 Around, the guests, sunk in such sea of charms. 
 With smiles and jests the costly cates consume — 
 The ladies with white bosoms and bare arms, 
 The gentlemen in dress that captiousness disarms. 
 
 But while they laugh and talk the time is trying, 
 The banquet sumptuous finds at length its close. 
 The wine cups all are drained, the lights are dying. 
 And to another function Fashion goes. 
 The Opera, supreme of nightly shows, 
 Doth, at this hour untimely, revel keep. 
 And when o'ervvearied mortals woo repose 
 Or lie already sunk in slumber deep, 
 It seeks with all its witcheries to banish sleep. 
 
 A FANTASIA ON THE OPERA. 
 
 Fair Music, in thy shrine 
 
 And citadel divine 
 I would meet thee, I would hear thee, 
 I would greet thee, and be near thee. 
 When the resounding orchestra begins 
 With bands of clarions and violins. 
 With flutes and fifes and hautboys playing. 
 With drums tattooing, trumpets braying, 
 
 Yet with power to diminish 
 
 To a whisper, and to finish 
 In a sound as soft as wood-dove's cooing, 
 Or the nightingale's wild wooing 
 
 As she pours her liquid tune 
 To the stars and the night and the moon, 
 And with sweet repeated trill 
 Our very soul with ecstasy doth fill. 
 
 Or with a crash like thunder 
 To rend the vault asunder, 
 To stir in rudest fashion 
 Our souls to angry passion. 
 To revenge, to jealousy, to dread — 
 Crashes of sound that would awake the dead, 
 That exalt our soul 
 To heroic height, 
 
THE CIRCLE OF FASHION. 
 
 Till the world of Nature whole 
 
 Seems to take flight, 
 And we are lest amid a swell 
 Of minstrelsy past parallel. 
 Such sounds, such scenes, O TNIusic, show me. 
 Let the tempest of thy sound o'erflow me. 
 Let me bathe in thy notes, 
 Let me behold 
 The trombones shooting out their brazen throats, 
 The trumpets flashing like gold. 
 And with their military din 
 Waking heroic dreams my soul within ; 
 The violins with fleet bows fluttering 
 
 Like flocks of birds upon th^ wing. 
 And wnth their shrill melodious voice uttering 
 The strains that flocks of birds might sing ; 
 The flute like skylark soaring. 
 Melodious warble pouring, 
 The hautboy tart and wild, 
 The clarionet romantical and mild, — 
 And all combining, 
 All designing. 
 To form one great stupendous chorus 
 Of sound sonorous. 
 
 Then when the scene 
 Opens in glittering sheen, 
 And to our eyes discloses pomps and processions royal 
 Of kings and conquerors old ; 
 Or doth unfold 
 Assemblies of conspirators disloyal. 
 
 And plots against a throne ; 
 Or doth discover 
 Some rapt unhappy lover. 
 Outside his lady's lattice making moan ; 
 Or discloses 
 Streams of silver, bowers of roses. 
 Where blushing girls and lovely ladies meet, 
 
 The gardens of Queen Marguerite, 
 Or those fair pleasure-grounds of endless spring, 
 Where Leonora and her maidens sing ; 
 
 Or to our eyes 
 Reveals a wedding's gay festivities. 
 
 Crowds of bridesmaids clothed in white 
 And bridesmen richly dight, 
 As that where the sad maid of Lammermoor 
 Was wedded. 
 
10 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 But not bedded, 
 By the Kelpie's shore. 
 
 Or the great scene 
 Widens, and in bands are seen 
 Banqueters ranged in tables down a hall. 
 Banqueting with shouts convivial, 
 Who at a given signal rise, 
 
 And with noisy cries 
 Troop eii masse adown the stage — 
 Such banquet as doth engage 
 Alfredo's guests, pale Violetta's lover, 
 Or such as we discover 
 Groaning the tables on. 
 
 When the great Don 
 Contemptuously defies 
 His crowds of menacers and enemies. 
 Such spectacles upon the stage 
 Our thoughts engage. 
 But the house itself is a spectacle of glory : 
 Storey upon storey, 
 Tier upon tier 
 The boxes their gay architecture rear. 
 
 From which in gorgeous sheen 
 Ladies ablaze with jewels lean, 
 
 With eyes glittering as bright 
 As the stars of the night. 
 All voluptuously dight 
 In toilettes cream and white. 
 With glorious coiffures of luxuriant hair. 
 Brown, auburn, raven-tressed, and golden fair. 
 With snowy arms and heaving bosoms bare — 
 A spectacle of radiance past compare. 
 And between the acts their fans fiout the air ; 
 And their scrutinising glasses 
 Turn with quick look upon what passes 
 In the stalls or in the boxes by them. 
 Meanwhile their lords, patterns of dignified docility. 
 
 Stand or sit anigh them — • 
 And all the pick of England's nobility. 
 All the wearers of some proud aristocratic name. 
 For beauty, life and colour, through the house'tis the same : 
 
 From floor to roof there is one blaze 
 Of gorgeous splendour the senses to amaze. 
 
 Such sight, I ween. 
 Can ne'er again on the dull earth be seen. 
 
 After the Opera to bed ! — No, no. 
 Not yet to bed — but first unto a ball ; 
 
THE CIRCLE OF FASHION. 11 
 
 For Lady Lancaster this night, you know, 
 Gives to her friends "a dance" described as "small, 
 Where throng the world of F'ashion, one and all. 
 E'en now the carriages by devious roads 
 Are leaving fast the Opera's gay hall. 
 And gilding to deposit their fair loads 
 Amid the glitter of Belgravia's blessed abodes. 
 
 And one of these most blessed, most princely, is 
 Her ladyship's, who gives the ball to-night. 
 Up to the door the dashing broughams whiz. 
 The guests in sumptuous toilettes do alight. 
 And enter m amid a blaze of light. 
 The ball-room is a sight one ne'er forgets ; 
 The floor sweeps out m distance infinite, 
 The ceiling is a mass of violets. 
 While sparkle from the wall a thousand dazzling jets. 
 
 Ladies in white and gentlemen in black, 
 Figures superb amid the ball-room's blaze, 
 Revolving down the hall in wheeling track. 
 Swimming and dreaming as the music plays, 
 Floating and gloating in the lamplight's rays. 
 Drinking the perfume, from the flowers that springs ; 
 And as they thread the undulating maze 
 Whispering of love, belike, and lovely things — . 
 Enchantment soft its spell about the ball-room flings. 
 
 And in the hall and stately corridors 
 Palms and magnolias and fan-like ferns 
 Bloom, as if sprung from herbage, o'er the floors. 
 And 'mid the greenery where'er one turns 
 Are mute recesses, alcoves dim, where burns 
 That pale dim light, which love delights to feel. 
 Here courtly love its first, best lessons learns. 
 A witchery, resistless in appeal. 
 Of scents, sounds, silence, charms, doth o'er the senses 
 steal. 
 
 Or to a nobler scene, a grander ground 
 For Fashion to display its lavishness — 
 Haply this night may be a night renowned, 
 When a Court Ball its radiant guests doth bless, 
 \\ hen England's glorious Prince and fair Princess 
 Their royal hospitality extend 
 To rank, birth, fortune, wealth, an.d loveliness, 
 When lordly equipages without end 
 Towards the palace gates their rumbling way do wend. 
 
12 THE EPIC QF LONDON. 
 
 E'en at the Opera there may be viewed 
 The first pale ghtter of the function great, 
 And when court suits amid the stalls intrude 
 And gorgeous ladies gleam, arriving late, 
 Then soon 'tis whispered that a Ball of State 
 That night in Buckingham's great palace walls 
 Doth the Ten Thousand in full pomp await. 
 And hither at their Queen's and Prince's calls 
 In endless bevies flock the bright celestials. 
 
 From carriages and carriages descend 
 Ladies and lords in bravest of array, 
 A brilliant stream that never hath an end. 
 What sight of splendour is the ball-room gay ! 
 A very sea of glittering display ! — 
 Feathers, and jewels, many a gaudy plume, 
 Diamonds hoarded for this single day, 
 Swords, velvet suits, in endless vista loom, 
 And crowd in vast magnificence the mighty room. 
 
 Up strikes the music, brilliant, light, and airy, 
 And to the tuneful twitterings of the band 
 A lady steps, with gestures like a fairy. 
 To whom the Prince himself extends the hand. 
 They lead the Minuet ; whose deftly planned 
 And graceful evolutions now begin 
 With bows majestic and with curtsies grand, 
 With steps and turns that admiration win. 
 While music sweet around pours forth its pleasant din. 
 
 O Paradise of all match-making mothers, 
 Elysium of every daughter's prayers. 
 Where earls and dukes and marquises and others, 
 To titles high and broad estates the heirs, 
 Noble, aristocratic millionaires, 
 Move at their ease with partners in the ball. 
 And she this mimic partnership who shares, 
 May muse on union more congenial, 
 May dream of broad estates, and hope to win them all. 
 
 What is the day, which such a restless night, 
 A night of stormy gaiety, succeeds ? 
 The day, with pearly grey and rosy light 
 Breaking in country lands o'er fields and meads. 
 Fragrant with daisies, fresh with waving reeds, 
 In London town breaks o'er another scene — 
 Breaks o'er ten thousand housetops, roofs, and leads, 
 * O'er miles of houses with no space between, 
 
THE CIRCLE OF FASHION. 13 
 
 O'er courts and lanes and yards with ne'er a patch of 
 green ; 
 
 Boring with grey the burrows of the poor, 
 Lightening with sickly pallor dismal slums, 
 Peering through squalid panes, and evermore 
 Glowing aglow, till to the West it comes, 
 The land of Edens and Elysiums, — 
 Breaking in Hoods upon the parks just when 
 From Buckingham's gay halls outpouring hums 
 The crowd of guests — first hastening homeward 
 then — 
 Legions of shivering dames, and troops of haggard men. 
 
 So ends the Ball of Fashion — at high day. 
 And haply when an hour or two have ffed, 
 A stately Drawing Room or brave Levee 
 Calls Fashion's votaries again from bed, 
 Where but an hour ago they laid their head, 
 To meet in feathers and in lace the Queen. 
 But truce to repetition vain. Instead 
 Haste we to later afternoon, I ween, 
 And rest our weary selves in some less turgid scene. 
 
 AN AT HOME. 
 
 In lordly drawing-room. 
 All brilliance and perfume. 
 Where crowds of mirrors flash 
 
 Their bright reflection, 
 Where streaming from each side 
 Such glories are espied, 
 Such lustres as abash 
 
 All recollection, 
 Where piles of bric-a-brac. 
 And trinkets without lack 
 Peep everywhere to view, 
 Along with china blue 
 In rare perfection, 
 Here amid costly furniture 
 In such profusion 
 As doth in every nook secure 
 
 Complete seclusion — 
 Guests sit and take their tea, 
 And indulge in conversation 
 
14 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 And intellectual communication 
 Fair and free. 
 What subjects without end 
 Dance before them ! 
 And how lavishly they spend 
 
 Their breath in running o'er them ! 
 Yet their opinions are as light 
 As bubbles bright 
 That glance a moment and are lost to siglit. 
 And their thoughts are no trouble, 
 
 But like any bubble 
 Come and go, meaning nought — 
 For a bubble is a thought. 
 So flies the conversation 
 Through the guests in the room, 
 Mixed with tea and collation 
 Which shed their fair perfume — 
 Till one arises, 
 A cultured guest. 
 Who with music sweet surprises 
 The ears of the rest ; 
 Or perhaps some tenor operatic, 
 Hired for the afternoon, 
 Gives forth his notes emphatic 
 In perfect tune. 
 And charmeth all, doth all beguile. 
 By. his pure intonation and consummate style ; 
 Or some composer, some man of genius, 
 Forced to let his talents out for hire. 
 Entrances all. 
 Spellbound doth them enthiall. 
 By his extemporary flights ingenious, 
 His harmonies of more than mortal choir, 
 Beneath whose touch the white and ivory keys 
 Rise with ease 
 To heavenly melody. 
 Such soul, such charm he doth inspire, 
 And lifts to regions higher 
 The listening company. 
 
 So goes the afternoon. 
 In conversation, tea, and tune — 
 
 All art, all soul. 
 E'en the dresses are an art, 
 And form no despicable part 
 
 Of the whole 
 
 For their sheen 
 
THE CIRCLE QF FASHION. 15 
 
 Of orange, mauve, rich brown, sage green. 
 And other noble colours, deep, subdued. 
 Whose gaudiness does not intrude 
 Upon the eye at peace and still. 
 It is a scene 
 Sweet and pleasant to the votaries of Fashion, 
 Where without passion 
 
 They may rest. 
 And resting gain a zest 
 For other pleasures of the night 
 Wherein to take delight. 
 
 Fashion m London, I have sung thee now. 
 Thy stately circle I have threaded through. 
 And so at length I leave thee with a bow. 
 As 1 myself soon left thy proud purheu. 
 To thee for ever bidding fond adieu. 
 For worser scenes I quitted thy domain — 
 For streets of many a trader, many a Jew, 
 Doomed to thy side ne'er to return again. 
 But to assail a life of sorrow, toil, and pain. 
 
 CANTO II. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 
 
 The road of Edgware stretcheth many a mile 
 Down from the Marble Arch to Cricklewood — 
 A most convenient shelter for awhile 
 To refugees from Fashion's neighbourhood. 
 Who quit their ancient haunts for reason good, 
 Sith round the corner of the Park it lies. 
 Dissevered from Mayfair by but a rood ; 
 And he who turns that corner, in a trice 
 F"inds himself lost, and plunged in new localities. 
 
 So was I lost, and l)and in hand with thee, 
 Ann, gentle friend, companion, mistress sweet, 
 I turned the corner ; and immediately 
 
16 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Plunged into Edgware Road and Oxford Street, 
 Where crowds on crowds of wayfarers we mset 
 And mobs of vehicles on every side. 
 On must we go ; too late 'twas to retreat ; 
 Down Holborn Hill, through Newgate to Clieapside, 
 We roamed confused, appalled, dazed, stunned and 
 stupefied : 
 
 So rushed the roar of traffic us around, 
 So hummed the rumbling wheels upon the ground. 
 So deafened were our ears with ceaseless sound. 
 So did our eyes the moving mass confound — 
 A glut of locomotion to astound. 
 With here a van, and there a nodding dray. 
 Heaped high with bulky lumber loosely bound, 
 Which, should the smallest fragment break away. 
 In awful avalanche would crash and crashing slay. 
 
 Thicker the stream, more deafening the hum. 
 Rising and roaring till a whirlpool wide 
 Of vans and waggons, carts in crowds that come. 
 Cabs, omnibuses, wains, in mighty tide 
 Roared at the bottom of immense Cheapside, 
 Filling with struggling vehicles the square. 
 Where the great Mansion House upon one side 
 Confronts the Bank, grim, ponderous, and bare. 
 Above the flood the twain upon each other stare. 
 
 Meanwhile along the pavements crowds of feet, 
 Packed close, precipitately press along. 
 One black and seething mass o'erflows the street. 
 With ne'er a gap, a crevice, in the throng. 
 On, on for ever, in a current strong 
 They push, they crowd, they jostle, and they crush, 
 As if delay or stillness were a wrong. 
 Onward they pour in one continuous rush 
 From morning until eve, with ne'er a pause or hush. 
 
 Such sights I saw with thee, Ann, oft I ween, 
 When hand in hand, two waits upon the sea, 
 We wandered, dazed spectators of the scene. 
 Time passed, and lo !' 'twas e'en the same with me — 
 I Avas amid that crowding company — 
 Pushing pedestrians, jostling business men, 
 Elbowing, struggling continually. 
 I was a pushing stern pedestrian then. 
 Struggling to be in time — nought other aim I ken. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 17 
 
 Down Aldersgate and past St. Martin Grand, 
 St. Paul's Churchyard and Paternoster Row, 
 Down Ludgate Hill, through Fleet Street to The 
 
 Strand, 
 Through crush and roar how often did I go, 
 Pressing my way amid the current slow ! 
 Or else down Cannon Street at feverish rate, 
 Where London Bridge, while buttresses below 
 Groan underneath the overwhelming freight, 
 Vomits its daily millions into Bishopsgate ! 
 
 Oft for a while up Blackman Street I sped 
 Through the packed Borough and its noisy throng, 
 O'er London Bridge, with tired and nervous tread, 
 Down the two Bishopsgates, and so along 
 To faded Hackney ; and a whole year long 
 Threading Cheapside up Broad Street dense I toiled 
 At nine each morning, when the stream was strong ; 
 And every noon to face I ne'er recoiled 
 Tlie crossing by the Bank, where glut of traffic boiled. 
 
 BUSINESS IN THE CITY. 
 
 Here in the centre of the hum 
 The noisy Stock Exchange unfolds its doors 
 To busy men who go and come ; 
 And at its open portal pours 
 A very babel on the ear, 
 
 That never-ceasing roars. 
 Gesticulating forms and eager faces 
 Everywhere appear ; 
 And in divers places 
 Groups and knots in colloquy around 
 Discuss the prices with looks profound. 
 Brokers with many a client. 
 Credulous and pliant, 
 Barter and profifer 
 The price they offer. 
 Happy faces, faces sad. 
 Starts of terror, 
 Looks of error. 
 Troubles deep and visions glad — 
 On all sides may be seen. 
 'Tis a strange scene. 
 
18 thp: epic of londqn. 
 
 Sometimes a name across the din 
 
 Is shouted in, 
 And goes echoing and soaring 
 Across the flooring, 
 Until its owner, greatly pressed 
 By business round that gives no rest, 
 Answers the call, and o'er the floor 
 Pushes his way towards the door. 
 But not the Stock Exchange alone — 
 No solitary mart does London own, 
 
 But bank on bank, one after other. 
 Each like, each busy as its brother. 
 Down Lombard Street, Cornhill, Threadneedle 
 Street, 
 
 Their numbers they repeat. 
 Their opulence and state. 
 And in this world of banks, clerks, cooped in pens. 
 In tens of thousands ply their pens, 
 To ledgers chained from morn till night ; 
 While at the counters, beaming bright, 
 
 Chink gold and silver pieces. 
 In a shower that never ceases — 
 So rains the gold in London town 
 All through the City up and down. — ■ 
 DoAvn Cheapside the storm of business hums, 
 Such multitude incessantly there comes 
 
 Of customers, who in and out 
 Of busy shops in miscellaneous rout 
 Pour chaffering and buying. 
 Their pleasant labour plying 
 Of picking and choosing, 
 Accepting, refusing. 
 Declining, rejecting. 
 And shrewdly selecting 
 The wares they require. 
 To meet the desire 
 Of fancy, or profit, or useful employment — 
 Crowds full in enjoyment — 
 Of barter and sale — 
 A mighty tide 
 In endless tale 
 All up and down Cheapside, 
 In at the jewellers', whose shops are shimmering 
 With sheafs of gold and siher glimmering, 
 At the booksellers', where rise in stacks 
 Volumes fair witli gaudy backs. 
 At the drapers', where bales of silk, 
 Loads of linen white as milk. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 19 
 
 Satins and poplins in mounds that rise, 
 
 Woo many fair admiring eyes, 
 At the tailors', where cloth in pompous pile 
 And suits ready made 
 
 Of the very newest cut and style 
 Are displayed ; 
 
 At the hosiers', where socks and ties 
 And collars whose eccentric shapes surprise, 
 
 Bedeck the window and call for buyers ; 
 At the glovers', where gloves the daintiest 
 Of tiny size with buttons quaintest 
 
 Captivate feminine desires. 
 
 So 'mid the busy turmoil on we go 
 Out from Cheapside to Paternoster Row, 
 Where publishers their precious books bestow. 
 Each bustling house from roof to basement low 
 With books is glutted. Books, books, books, I trow. 
 Excite the nervous traffic to and fro. 
 Oh ! 'tis a street of misey and woe 
 To luckless authors, as all authors know. 
 And I was one among tlie luckless long ago. 
 
 Then on to Fleet Street — through St. Paul's Church- 
 yard 
 
 Down Ludgate Hill, and we are at St. Bride's, 
 
 Where crowded Fleet Street, which doth pace retard 
 
 Begins to pour its ever thickening tides. 
 
 Black are the crowds which throng the causeway's 
 sides. 
 
 And black the vehicles which which fill the road. 
 
 'Tis here the empire of the Press resides. 
 
 Here countless journals have their dear abode. 
 Some in palatial halls and premises bestowed- 
 
 News ! news ! news ! news ! from all the ends of 
 
 the earth 
 Come pouring in to this industrious hive. 
 Wires, which enlace the globe's enormous girth, 
 Impinge their pointed tongues with news alive 
 Full on to Fleet Street ; dashing hansoms drive 
 To ofhce doors, men springing out amain. 
 Who to be first with news unportant strive. 
 While in the. post-box letters in a rain. 
 Despatches, missives, notes, a ceaseless shower maintain. 
 
 Inside the office, grinding like a mill, 
 The mighty printing press, with open jaw, 
 
20 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Perpetually grinding, never still, 
 Devours the news delivered to its maw. 
 And yields it up again without a flaw 
 Imprinted clean on snowy paper white. 
 On sheets in thousands, such as man ne'er saw. 
 Thus does it toil the livelong day and night. 
 In roar and restless uproar taking its delight. 
 
 Before we pass into the happy Strand, 
 By Temple Bar is Chancery's long Lane ; 
 And here in Fleet Street upon either hand 
 The Inns of Court and lawyers hold their reign. 
 Wigged and begowned they make their presence 
 
 plain. 
 Oh ! what a world of actions, suits and pleas. 
 And writs and summonses, this law's domain. 
 Where learned lawyers, living at their ease, 
 Sit frowning o'er a brief, or, smiling, pocket fees ! 
 
 Be far from me, be far from me, I pray. 
 Closer acquaintance with those learned men, 
 Than what I make from walls and windows grey. 
 Which circle and seclude their dingy den ! 
 Be far from me ! for life is happiest when 
 Absent are law and publishers, I trow. 
 Two of the greatest plagues which trouble men. 
 Therefore may I of law as little know. 
 As now, thank God ! I do of Paternoster Row. 
 
 We all this while are walking down the Strand, 
 And on through Cockspur Street to Regent Street, 
 Where changing scenes aAvait us on each hand — 
 Carriages rolling, well dressed crowds, we meet, 
 Loitering idlers, fops superb and neat. 
 Ladies in toilettes gaudier than the fops'. 
 But what our eyes especially doth greet. 
 It is the brave array of showy shops. 
 At which at every step one finds a charm, and stops. 
 
 Here is the seat of all that Avomen prize. 
 The princely drapers of the peerless West 
 Each with the other emulously vies 
 To show in noble Avindows, richly dressed. 
 The silks and costly stuffs he values best. 
 Here and in Oxford Street, which near it lies. 
 Doth drapery attain its height confessed. 
 Without the vasty shops, Avhat wares one spies ! 
 Within, .what ceaseless life and busy bustle flies 1 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS, 21 
 
 A FANTASIA ON A LARGE LONDON 
 DRAPER'S. 
 
 There are counters, endless counters, 
 
 With endless shelves above them, 
 And behind them one encounters 
 Bevies of shopgirls neatly dressed, 
 
 Looking their best, 
 Some so pretty you could love them, 
 All eager to serve you 
 With what they can 
 ('Tis a scene that may unnerve you, 
 If you are a man). 
 But amid your confusion 
 At the vast profusion 
 Of stuffs and silks and bales and robes around you, 
 Which doth quite confound you. 
 Up comes the shopwalker, 
 A gentleman superlatively dressed 
 
 In faultless frock coat and flowered vest, 
 A man of courtly manners and a talker, 
 Who enquires politely 
 If he can direct you rightly 
 To the exact point j^ou desire. 
 Such is his skill, that with one word he rights you, 
 
 And invites you 
 To the counter and the object you require. 
 Here you are at first bewildered by the multiplicity 
 of wares. 
 You sink amid the chairs, 
 While the busy maiden. 
 Helped by a shop assistant laden 
 With bales and rolls too heavy far for her. 
 
 Shows you with pretty fuss and stir 
 Pattern after pattern for your selection 
 Or rejection. 
 There you sit and make objection. 
 Examining now this now that 
 To the accompaniment of chat. 
 Meanwhile about, around you, 
 At all the counters that surround you. 
 Are customers in dozens, all intent 
 On the same task whereon your heart is bent, 
 Customers in dozens in the aisles 
 Of winding counters, shaded with the piles 
 Of drapery that load the shelves 
 
22 THE EPIC QF LONDON. 
 
 And fall in trailing canopies around themselves. 
 If such the customers and buyers be, 
 What the employes are, now see. 
 The shop it is a world — a world for size, 
 A world for self-completion, 
 A world, whose boundaries comprise 
 A population to repletion, 
 A crowd of human beings knit by a loose league, 
 With all their joys and interests, troubles and intrigue. 
 
 The shopgirls clever at a sale, 
 The shopmen deft at handling a bale, 
 
 The dressmakers immured in dozens. 
 Like the milliners their cousins, 
 In the upstairs apartments. 
 Working there all day. 
 The managers of departments, 
 Shrewd men of business in their Avay, 
 The shopwalkers, grand and tall, 
 Like gentlemen all. 
 The expert cashiers the cash who take 
 W'ith never a mistake. 
 The clerks in endless tale, 
 Female and male. 
 The young improvers, innocent and tender. 
 Of figure fair and slender. 
 The porters most plebeian. 
 Denied the region empyrean. 
 Where are admitted all the otliers. 
 Their business sisters and business brothers — 
 
 All these, I say, 
 Make a fair world, a close societ}^ — 
 A world we term them with propriety. 
 They meet at certain times each day ; 
 They meet at meals, at breakfast, dinner, tea. 
 At supper, meal of liberty. 
 
 And oft at night they lie 
 Beneath the friendly roof asleep 
 In attic high. 
 In dormitory deep, 
 Like schoolboys and schoolgirls sunk in slumber. 
 
 What crowds of thoughts, what loves, what hates, 
 What enmities, aversions without number. 
 What spite, what spleen, what sorrow germinates 
 Amid them in this little world, their dwelling! 
 Yet all the while 
 They must wear a smile, 
 And seem to think of only what they're selling- 
 How many an intrigue ! what opportunity 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 23 
 
 For breaking hearts with much immunity ! 
 How many sighs ! 
 How many a maiden dies! — 
 And all goes on annd the tide 
 Of business, which does all things hide — 
 Love, hatred, env^y, malice deep, 
 Not one must be allowed to peep 
 Above the surface of complete servility, 
 Which constitutes the employe's chief utility. 
 
 Through shops like these in thousands we may rove 
 
 In Oxford Street and busy Brompton Road, 
 
 In Edgware Road and seething Westbourne Grove 
 
 Where trade's chief genius has his huge abode, 
 
 In premises palatial bestowed ; 
 
 In King's Road Chelsea, Kensington's High Street, 
 
 In Hampstead Road and Tottenham Court's high 
 
 Road, 
 Where'er we turn, us do vast vitas greet 
 Of shops, shops, shops, which vitas vast of shops repeat. 
 
 Shops of all kinds — drapers', upholsterers', 
 Tailors', and haberdashers', hosiers', 
 Milliners', furriers', costumiers'. 
 Merchants of glass and china, stationers, 
 Cutlers and silversmiths and jewellers, 
 Grocers and teamen, cheese and buttermen. 
 Butchers and brave Italian warehousemen — 
 Perfumers, fruiterers — all come within our ken. 
 
 These send at eve their mustering levies forth 
 Of pale employes, legions infinite, 
 In all directions, east, west, south, and north, 
 And call them back with the return of light 
 To toil once more from early morn till night. 
 Thrice gentle eve, which this relief affords ! 
 *Tis then that eke its toilers to respite, 
 All the vast City belches forth its hordes 
 From banks and offices, from syndicates and boards. 
 
 These multifarious streams, which forward flow 
 With divers currents but the selfsame will, 
 From London only unto London go — 
 To Brixton, Camberwell, and Notting Hill, 
 To Stockwell, Clapham, and to Denmark Hill — 
 Parts of the town outlying, far away ; 
 Or else to Greater London further still. 
 To Chingford, Forest Gate, and Harringay, 
 To Bromley, Bickley, Dulwich, and St. Mary Cray. 
 
24 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 CANTO III. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 
 THE TRAFFIC. 
 
 Oh, let me sing the traffic and the trains 
 Which bear the men of business up to town, 
 Deposit them in Business' domains, 
 And then at eve again convey them down 
 To suburb sweet or purheu of renown. 
 Where for some hours they may forget their cares. 
 And lapped in brief domestic bhss may drown 
 All thoughts of trade, commodities and wares. 
 Ledgers, banks, bills, accounts, securities and shares. 
 
 A FANTASIA 
 ON THE MORNING TRAINS AND TRAFFIC. 
 
 When morning twilight peeps, I ween, 
 Then begin the trains. 
 
 They may be seen 
 Loaded like laden wains, 
 That creak and groan to break the axle-tree, 
 Such groaning trains you see. 
 They forge along and plough their way 
 With undulating motion, 
 Like ships ploughing the spray 
 In the great ocean. 
 Oft have I seen them pressing on each other, 
 
 Eacli one as loaded as its brother, 
 All filled with business men reading the news. 
 With brows already knitted 
 And for the day's work fitted. 
 As they the sheets peruse. 
 The stations in the morning all round London town 
 Are blocked with trains, without, within, 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 25 
 
 That fill the lines all up and down, 
 Each waiting to get in. 
 One stops— then stop all. 
 One whistles and goes. 
 Then follow the others in long rows 
 And pomp processional. 
 
 At last they arrive — 
 Out bursts the busy hive 
 Of busy bees, or men, within. 
 Some sheer along the platform race 
 At feverish pace. 
 With set determined face, 
 Seeking the barrier first to win. 
 Some more sedate, 
 Accustomed to be late, 
 Proceed with step more slow, 
 But all at hasty rate 
 Onward go. 
 And all in a throng 
 Pouring along — 
 With their boots polished finely, 
 And their hats brushed divinely. 
 And their faces washed and clean for the day. 
 So they make their way. 
 
 Jostling, crushing. 
 Past each other brushing, 
 With greater zeal or less 
 
 Amid the press, 
 As their need may be ; 
 For of all whom there you see 
 Each serves in some capacity, 
 Each has his hour, his office, and his minute 
 In which he must be in it. 
 But they who out of Clapham hail. 
 By the fair Common's pale. 
 From Streatham on the Hill and Brixton Rise, 
 Balham and such localities — 
 Come pouring in on 'buses stacked, 
 Inside and outside packed, 
 Often with post horns tooting 
 And horses four before them shooting. 
 As they go flying 
 And defying 
 Wind and weather in their race 
 To reach in time their business place. 
 
26 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Past Kennington they hie, 
 Load after load, 
 The Elephant and Old Kent Road. 
 Down High Street Borough, Blackman Street, they fly. 
 Till to its ridge 
 Where rises London Bridge. 
 That is the end ; 
 There they descend, 
 And join the concourse that without cessation 
 
 Comes pouring from the station, 
 Of men from Brockley, Bexley, Eltham, Lee, 
 And Blackheath's fair vicinity. 
 O'er London Bridge 
 Then in a sea they go, 
 Crossing its ridge 
 With motion sIoav. 
 Its mighty breast 
 Such traffic doth congest, 
 All must proceed at rate 
 Grave and deliberate. 
 Thus 'mid one immense and overpowering hum. 
 Inch by inch into the City they come. 
 But they who out of western suburbs hail, 
 Fair Netting Hill, green Holland Park's abode, 
 
 Sweet Shepherd's Bush and Goidhawk Road, 
 Into London on cars and 'buses sail. 
 Passing on their leafy way 
 Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park gay, 
 Till at the Marble Arch they meet 
 The traffic that rages in Oxford Street. 
 In they dash. 
 Into the hash and the crash 
 Of vehicles struggling, blocked and turning. 
 Cabs, 'buses, carriages, vans and drays. 
 
 Motor-cars with oil ablaze. 
 Bicycles flashing, all caution spurning. 
 In zigzag flight on their tortuous ways — 
 Into the hash and the crash 
 In they dash. 
 And piloted by their Jehu skilful. 
 An enemy to all science wilful. 
 Safely emerge 
 From the crashing surge 
 Up at the Bank, 
 Where they descend. 
 And they God may thank 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 27 
 
 For their journey's end. 
 And so come in all they who hail 
 
 From Kilburn and from Maida Vale, 
 On cars and 'buses load by load 
 Down Edgware Road. 
 And thus by divers avenues 
 In they ride from many fair purlieus 
 
 Round London reaching north, east, west, 
 Where 'buses hold the palm confessd. 
 
 But oh ! for traffic, and at morning hours. 
 Commend me to the dingy Underground. 
 What is the Underground ? Is 't not, ye powers. 
 One of the veins and arteries profound. 
 The mighty city's body that surround, 
 Pouring its very blood and life along, 
 Which flows unseen and underneath the ground 
 In steady stream continuous and strong, 
 Laden with life — with London's multifarious throng ? 
 
 Oft have I thought and deeply pondered so, 
 When all alone, the platform pacing slow, 
 Train after train has passed me to and fro. 
 Discharging from its side, like waves that flow, 
 The busy crowds that ceaseless come and go. 
 "Lo London's veins ! Each train," I have confessed, 
 "Is but a beat of London's pulse. I trow. 
 The engine stops ; and from its iron hreast 
 Heaves forth a weary sign of thankfulness and rest. 
 
 What traffic loads the busy Underground ! 
 What ceaseless streams of trains beneath our feet 
 Pursue their pathway in that pit profound ! 
 How many thousands dive benneath the street. 
 Emerging only where new prospects greet 
 Their dazzled eyes! What swarms from morn till night 
 Their dusky and adventurous rides repeat ! 
 Like men led blindfold to some charming sight. 
 They yield themselves to darkness to attain new light. 
 
 And so all day from early morn till night 
 Through Underground and Tube the traffic flows. 
 And through the fleet Electric, buried quite 
 Beneath the rolling Thames which o'er it goes. 
 And on the breast of Thames what gallant shows 
 
■28 THE EPIG OF LONDON. 
 
 Of loaded steamboats puffing o'er the mere, 
 Conveying legions to their business, those 
 From Chelsea, Lambeth, and from rriany a pier. 
 Who breast the stream, and soon into the City steer ! 
 
 Who hath beheld in Jewin Street the dull, 
 When busy six o'clock 's the hour of day. 
 And with a stress of freight the street is full, — 
 A van, two carts, three trollies and a dray 
 Mixed in inextricable crashing fray ? 
 The noise is echoed from the stuccoed sides 
 Of warehouses on either side the way. 
 While carts and horses with advancing strides 
 Pour to augment the broil in never ending tides. 
 
 Who hath beheld the traffic and the stir. 
 Which ferment^ at St. Martin's, hight Le Grand, 
 Destined each evening daily to recur. 
 When the great clock to six doth turn its hand ?' 
 Then rush the rattling carts in noisy band 
 Into the square. Then springing from the box 
 The active pc5stman at the back doth stand 
 To hurry' from the' flap, which he unlocks,' 
 His load'ed slacks, ere six doth peal upon the clocks. 
 
 ■'''! ' 
 
 Around, his brothers in a mighty crush, 
 Bent on the selfsanle task, their labour ply. 
 And with their bags nppn their shoulders rush 
 Into the h§.ll, for lo ! the hour is nigh. 
 And at an open window, one on high 
 Stands to receive the sacks and bags thrown in. 
 In, in a very deluge, in they fly. 
 Each labouring postman glad the porch to win, 
 Ere theS'dread tones of six upon the clock begin. 
 
 At length the fatal moment comes, and One, 
 Rings out tliebell — then Two — thenThree^s the chime. 
 Quicker and quicker pours the shower begun. 
 In swish the letters bound for every clime, 
 Each fateful bag just flying in in time. 
 The last stroke sounds vfche window crashes d(!5wn. 
 Then come the late ones. Lateness is a crime'; 
 And the grim window shut with angry frown 
 Proclaims to the off'enders.fin^s and ill renown. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 29 
 
 Who hath beheld, late, late amid the night 
 Around the Post arrayed a noble sight — 
 The Parcel Post's mail coaches ready dight. 
 With champing steeds and glittering lamps alight, 
 A royal team of four, whose dizzy flight 
 Through country roads will put the winds to shame, 
 Bearing behind them parcels infinite. 
 And scattering from their equipage aflame 
 Bags, boxes, baskets, packs for every place and name ? 
 
 Meanwhile from towns and villages around 
 Come other noble equipages bound 
 To London's self, eke through the night profound 
 Racing their fiery journey o'er the ground. 
 These pass the others oft, with roaring sound 
 Of snorting steeds and wheels that crash the road, — 
 Then at the dawn of light in London found 
 Unloose their snorting steeds, discharge their load 
 Of parcels for the town in multitudes bestowed. 
 
 But who hath seen the steaming trains that land 
 In huge King's Cross, St. Pancras, Euston Square, 
 Lines that like mighty snakes coil through the land 
 And every day and hour fresh burdens bear 
 Of strangers and adventur'rs here that fare, 
 And with new throngs the population swell ? 
 For sooth of strangers hither who repair 
 Two thousand enter daily, so they tell, 
 In London town — henceforth in London doomed to dwell. 
 
 But not alone the loads thus daily drawn 
 By snorting trains of new intruding souls — 
 For floating to the docks at early dawn 
 Come landmg eager emigrants in shoals 
 Fro:-n foreign parts — Jews, Lascars, Russians, Poles, 
 Hungarians, Germans, seeking here a haven, 
 Whose uncouth tongue in helpless jargon rolls. 
 Thus flock the crowds to London, daily driven 
 From every land and every city under Heaven. 
 
30 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 CANTO IV. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 
 THE MARKETS. 
 
 Oh, let me sing the monstrous city's maw ! 
 Insatiate it gorges all the day, 
 And grasps unending meat with greedy claw, 
 Which butchers round perpetually slay. 
 Each hour from early morn till night, they say, 
 A thousand sheep do enter in its maw, 
 And seven thousand beeves are not each day 
 Enough to satiate its ravening jaw. 
 Birds fly in flocks adown, and are devoured raw. 
 
 Swine in unending herds are driven in, 
 And hecatombs of calves are offered it. 
 Rabbits in tens of thousands entrance win, 
 With poultry plucked and ready for the spit. 
 Pheasants in clouds make many a dainty bit. 
 Fish of all kinds float down, both large and small. 
 With turtle huge, for London's banquets tit. 
 Hams, gammons, flitches, are hurled in and fall 
 Into the monstrous mouth, which makes away with all. 
 
 The loaves it swallows at a single meal. 
 If piled like bricks into a pyramid 
 Would to the eye a new St. Paul's reveal. 
 The flour which is required for one day's bread, 
 Cakes, puddings, pastry, biscuits, buns, 'tis said, 
 If raised aloft to Heaven, and let go 
 Upon the city from the sky o'erhead — - 
 It would all day a very blizzard blow. 
 And lay enormous London ankle deep in snow. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 31 
 
 Down London's copious throat is drink poured 
 
 down — 
 Beer in such floods, as let at large to flow 
 Would sweep away one quarter of the town ; 
 Wine in a current steadier and slow, 
 Pouring from tuns in cellars cool and low ; 
 Spirits, of strength to make tlie brain to swoon — 
 Spirits, fell founts of misery and woe ! — 
 Which lash through London in such vast lagoon, 
 Their blazing flame, if fired, would terrily the moon. 
 
 Such drinks, such foods, are swallowed, swilled and 
 
 drunk, 
 Englutted and enjoyed the livelong day. 
 Forth from the Markets through the mighty trunk 
 To its extremest verge they make their way. 
 To the last fibres nourishment convey, 
 Thus to sustain the teeming multitude. 
 The Markets, like a Stomach, to allay 
 The town's voracious appetite and rude, 
 Receive from far and nigh their mountains huge of food. 
 
 At times I do remember late at night 
 Returning from some haunt of sad delight, 
 When all the town in sleep was buried quite, 
 Lo ! suddenly there loomed upon my sight 
 A moving structure of stupendous height. 
 Which filled with gloom the silent Clapham Road. 
 What was this monument of dire affright ? 
 A wain for Covent Garden bound, a load 
 Of fresh and fragrant greens in rustic pomp bestowed. 
 
 In ranks on ranks arose green cabbages. 
 By careful cable bound and fettered tight, 
 So that the team of horses at their ease. 
 Heedless of load collapsing, travel might. 
 And thus had they been toiling through the night 
 From Mitcham or from Sutton far away. 
 Till by the glimmer of the morning light 
 They hoped to be in Covent Garden gay, 
 W'here they with profit might their fragrant greens display. 
 
32 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 A RHAPSODY ON COVENT GARDEN. 
 
 And as they travel near, 
 More waggon -loads appear, 
 Like ghosts along the silent causeway wending. 
 An ever swelling throng 
 Which creaks and rolls along. 
 From every point to Covent Garden trendnig. 
 All harnessed in the night 
 By misty lantern light 
 In country stall in many a village dwelling. 
 Have they o'er weary miles 
 Their vegetable piles 
 Through night and mire and darkness been propelling. 
 To land at last in London town 
 Just at the dawn of morning brown. 
 
 From Broxbourne here they fare. 
 From Edmonton and Ware, 
 From Bexley, Crayford, Leatherhead and Welling ; 
 For all the peasants round 
 Of London's mighty bound 
 Their fragrant wares in London would be selling. 
 But now the light is clearer, 
 And Covent Garden nearer. 
 And through its jaws, great avenues, are pouring 
 Huge waggons and their teams, 
 And market carts in streams — 
 A mash and crash of traffic there is roaring. 
 In avalanches fall 
 Round many a fragrant stall 
 Great mountains huge of vegetable treasure, 
 White-breasted cauliflowers 
 And onions sleek in showers. 
 And carrots gay and parsnips without measure. 
 Crisp curling cabbages, 
 In verdant pods the pease. 
 And turnips white, their shapely bulbs displaying. 
 Potatoes in a storm. 
 And lettuce in a swarm. 
 And radishes their radiant roots arraying. 
 Beans buxom, broad, and green, 
 With white and purple sheen 
 Asparagus to epicures delicious, 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 33 
 
 Parsley with tassels light, 
 And celery so white. 
 And mushrooms brown for dainty feasts propitious- 
 All these beneath the sky 
 In motley heaps do lie. 
 And to the stalls with hasty skill are sorted, 
 Where glittering and green 
 Beneath the morning sheen 
 Invitingly they lie in lots assorted. 
 But meantime pouring in 
 With new augmenting din 
 Comes fruit in mountains none the less portentous, 
 From England not alone, 
 But far in orchards grown 
 From France and sunny Italy 'tis sent us. 
 Or further still from sultry Spain 
 And torrid climes beyond the main, 
 Jamaica's isle and India's plain. 
 In ships despatched and many a train, 
 To feed with saps and soothly drown 
 In juice and nectar London town — ■ 
 Grapes, apricots, and nectarines. 
 The peach, the melon and the quince. 
 And shoals of apples rosy-cheeked and yellow, 
 Bananas curving thick and long. 
 Pomegranates in a russet throng. 
 And warden pears incomparably mellow. 
 Figs, purple-shimmering and sleek. 
 Peaches with red and downy cheek, 
 With golden -rinded oranges in million ; 
 The prickly pineapple is there. 
 And filling baskets everywhere 
 Cherries in untold multitudes vermilion. 
 
 What currants red and black and white, 
 What bursting plums appear to sight. 
 What strawberries, in scarlet hosts assembled, 
 W^hat raspberries of paler hue. 
 What swelling grapes in clusters blue. 
 That yesterday on hothouse roof have trembled ! 
 But by their side what balmy scents 
 Assail with sweets our every sense! 
 They float upon us, wafted whence? 
 
 From flowers which lie in legion. 
 All gently breathing on the breeze 
 Their odours soft and sure to pleeise, 
 And bringing fresh from country leas 
 
34 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 The scents of many a region. 
 Here laugh the lilies 
 And daffodillies, 
 Here frown the tulips, 
 
 Here bask the pinks, 
 Here daisies dimple. 
 The violets simple 
 Here pout their blue lips. 
 
 The crocus winks. 
 The primrose yellow. 
 The cowslip sallow 
 Here shine and shimmer 
 
 With fairy light. 
 Here wealth of roses 
 Its sheen discloses 
 With gaudy glimmer 
 
 Upon the sight. 
 The fair carnation 
 Of scent delicious. 
 The white narcissus. 
 
 The eglantine, 
 Shed exhalation 
 O'er snowdrops sparkling 
 And pansies darkling 
 
 And jessamine. 
 
 And all in heaps they languish smiling, 
 
 The sense beguiling 
 
 With hue and scents, 
 Delicious fragrance round them breathing. 
 Their blossoms wreathing 
 
 In innocence. 
 And now with hurry 
 And now with flurry 
 Come crowding up the customers. 
 A very Babel of bustle stirs — 
 Of chaffering for fruits and flowers. 
 Of trafficking, buying. 
 
 For hours and hours. 
 
 Thus wears the day, 
 And time is flying. 
 All let defying 
 
 Upon its way. 
 
THE CIRCLE QF BUSINESS. 35 
 
 A RHAPSODY ON SMITHFIELD. 
 
 Now pass we to another scene — 
 From this array of fragrant green 
 Unto the reahn of meat. 
 In Smithfield is its home and dear retreat. 
 There in the market wide 
 In endless ranks hang side by side 
 Carcasses fresh and sweet. 
 Here are the butchers' blocks 
 Charged Avith the spoils of many an ox, 
 With ham, 
 With lamb, 
 With mutton fair, 
 With legs and shoulders 
 Big as boulders. 
 And of flavour rare. 
 Many a mighty baron of beef. 
 For feasts in favour. 
 Looms at the stalls in bold relief. 
 
 Here rounds of savour 
 Superlative, and rich sirloin, 
 Their flavours, savours, ponderousness join. 
 Meantime the butchers at the stalls, 
 Dressed in blue aprons striped with white, 
 And sharpening their knives and cleavers bright, 
 Each louder than the other bawls. 
 Vying hard their wares to tout 
 To crowds of buyers who stand about 
 Gaping, scrutinising, listening, 
 Eyeing the joints with gristle glistening, 
 Glistening with gristle, laughing with lean. 
 Shining with fat of milkwhite sheen. 
 One after other the joints change hands, 
 Passing away in quick succession 
 
 To the possession 
 Of the crowd that cheapening stands. 
 
 Such is the scene, 
 A strange and busy one, I ween. 
 
 And full as busy, though with throng less dense. 
 The scene, which in its lofty bravearcade 
 Long Leadenhall unto the eye presents. 
 
36 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Here is a very avenue of trade ; 
 Here has a mighty mart of meat been made, 
 Which feeds the hungry crowds that congregate 
 In Aldgate and in Eastclieap, and pervade 
 Shoreditch and Houndsditch nigh the market's gate, 
 And populate the length of busy Bishopsgate. 
 
 Lead me to Bethnal Green, where rises high 
 With architecture bad, baroque and rude, 
 Columbia Market, flaunting to the eye 
 Its spires and piers above a neighbourhood 
 Crammed with a ragged, squalid, wretched brood, 
 Whose miserable huts in multitude 
 Rot round the pile which Charity decreed. 
 It feeds them, or it starves them — as they would. 
 For wealth has reared the gorgeous mart, indeed, 
 But left the poor to find the wherewithal to feed. 
 
 Haste we away, or ere the day is old. 
 To Billingsgate, where Thames's billow rolls, 
 AVhere fish in hecatombs are bought and sold, 
 Where from the wave come pouring in in shoals 
 Cod, herrings, haddocks, halibut and soles. 
 Plaice, flounders, skait, sprats, mackerel and eels. 
 Crabs, lobsters, whiting, tunny fish in shoals. 
 With costly salmon packed in milkwhite creels, 
 Sturgeon and turbot white, a whet for lordly meals. 
 
 But now the evening is drawing in, 
 And all regardless of its chilly damps 
 The costermongers with a clattering din 
 Are kindling busily their reeking lamps, 
 Whose lurid flame illuminates their camps 
 Of barrows piled with fruitage country grown 
 (The patient fruit of long and weary tramps,) 
 Which they in dingy lanes and alleys lone 
 Expose to bartering sale in markets of their own. 
 
 In Farringdon's drear Road, in Drury Lane, 
 And 'mid the garbage that surrounds the dens 
 Which squalid Seven Dials doth contain, 
 In Walworth's alleys, and amid the fens 
 Of humid Lambeth and the New Cut's pens, 
 In Portobello Road and Blackman Street, 
 'Mid Ratcliffe Highway's tattered denizens. 
 In Leather Lane and Edgware Road — they meet, 
 The costermongers blithe, and form a mart complete. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF BUSINESS. 37 
 
 Often in Farringdon's drear Road have I 
 Beheld the hucksters kindhng busily 
 Their naphtha lamps beneath the evening sky. 
 Often, sweet Ann, have you and I passed by, 
 And paused, attracted by the wares, to buy, 
 And bought of fruits and nuts and cates a store, 
 To be transported homeward gleefully 
 In bag or basket Blackfriars' arches o'er, 
 A feast for Sunday blest, when week days' work is o'er. 
 
 Oft have I roamed in Drury Lane alone. 
 And viewed with interest the chaffering crowd, 
 The barrows drawn against the curbing stone. 
 The costermongers, bold and brazen-browed. 
 Vaunting their priceless wares with voices loud, 
 The humble poor astir amid the mud, 
 The ruffian looks, the timid and the cowed, 
 The strifes, the fights, and oft a face all blood, 
 Which some kind friend will cleanse by licking off the 
 flood. 
 
 Often when promenading Regent Street 
 'Neath gleaming lamps at eventide, have I 
 Toward Clare Market turned my willing feet 
 To watch the poor in ragged rabble buy. 
 To mark them eye the joints, yet pass them by 
 For inconsiderable morsels there. 
 Then have I thought — one man to have supply 
 Of fifty oxen for his daily fare. 
 While others scarce have scraps — how monstrous, how 
 unfair ! 
 
 Often did I, \vhen wandering late at night. 
 List to the orators in Leather Lane, 
 Where 'neath a very blaze of lurid light 
 The Clerkenwellian costermongers reign. 
 Roaring their rhetoric, and not in vain ; 
 Touting a miscellaneous world of wares, 
 Not greens alone and vegetables plain. 
 But umbrellas, crockery, and chairs. 
 Clothes, fish, tools, books, tongs, brooms, hats, boots in 
 countless pairs. 
 
 Then roving home from Leather Lane the gay 
 Through Bloomsbury and Oxford Street, then quiet, 
 Lo I I have met the market in my way 
 Of Edgware Road, then in full swing and riot 
 (Past twelve o'clock the time of this disquiet.) 
 There have I seen fish, fiesh, potatoes sold. 
 
38 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 And solaced oft my stomach with a diet 
 Of oysters, with their sign ,,Blue Points " writ bold, 
 And thence returned home all shivering and cold ; 
 
 Sometimes perchance upon my lonely way 
 Passing and pausing at a coffee stall. 
 Which while the rest of London sleeping lay 
 Had oped its friendly canvas, at the call 
 Of passing wayfarers belated all. 
 Here in strange company perhaps I sipped 
 The peaceful unstilled cup, which stilleth brawl, 
 And listened to the chat around which slipped 
 From men and women oft immodest and foul-lipped. 
 
 CANTO V. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF LABOUR. 
 
 Oh, let me sing of London's weary slaves ! 
 Though are not all its millions slaves ? — slaves born ? 
 The business men who in their mighty waves 
 Pour to and from the city night and morn, 
 The tradesmen chained to counters, clerks forlorn, 
 Shopgirls to shops in bevies hurrying ? — 
 Yet worse is slavery with added scorn. 
 And poverty and want oft threatening ; — 
 The humble labouring, toiling" crowds — of these I sing. 
 
 Come with me, Muse, to some obscure retreat, 
 Where in a garret, and anigh the sky, 
 A woman sits, with skilful fingers fleet. 
 Forcing the thread in busy race to fly. 
 Hour after hour her labour will she ply. 
 Through gusset, band and seam the needle steals. 
 Weary her fingers, weary is her eye, 
 And weary is her brain, which well nigh reels. 
 When from the tower without the hour of midnight peals. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF LABOUR. 39 
 
 Yet on she must ! still onward she must sew ; 
 And many a time must sew till dawn of day ; 
 Year after year must labour, till she grow 
 From a young girl, old, wrinkled, gaunt and grey — 
 For paltry pittance, for a wretched pay 
 Which doth not merest nourishment bestow : 
 But hunger, famine, cold are hers ahvay. 
 And thus in tens of thousands women sew 
 For ever and for ever in that town of woe. 
 
 And men, a sex for lofty deeds designed, 
 Men ones for heroism fashioned, men 
 But little lower than the angels kind — 
 Take me, O Muse, to some dire sweater's den. 
 Where 'neath a smoking lamp in stifling pen 
 Crowds of my fellows sweat away their life 
 Toiling for pence with masters alien. 
 To keep from starving and to shield from strife 
 A troop of ragged children and a ragged wife. 
 
 Who are the men who pound from morn till night 
 With ponderous pestle, in the causeway, stones. 
 Making the blank walls echo with affright 
 At ceaseless repetition of dull tones ? 
 Who are the men, who kneel with aching bones 
 On knee-pads, and laboriously lay 
 Those wooden blocks — the ghosts of paving stones — 
 In puzzle patterns patiently all day ? 
 Who be these bendmg labourers ? What men are they ? 
 
 Oft have I watched the bricklayers labouring 
 In thriving suburb — Penge or Willesden Green, — 
 Have marked them scale the skilful scaffolding 
 W^ith hods of bricks their shoulders stout between. 
 Place brick on brick, on brickwork brickwork lean — 
 And as they toiled, jibed, sighed with weary airs. 
 Cursed, talked — I said, „In everj' house, I ween. 
 Each layer of bricks is mortared with men's cares. 
 Each wall its load of troubles and distresses bears." 
 
 W'hat work is theirs, what task of thanklessness, 
 Who pull down houses in the London ways. 
 And each few minutes thread the busy press 
 Bearing the dusty debris upon trays 
 Out from the hoardings, which exclude all gaze ! 
 
40 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Meantime at back the wall, which crowbars push, 
 Belching- forth dust, irresolutely sways, 
 And threatens any moment down to rush, 
 And its poor tormentors to powder dire to crush. 
 
 A RHAPSODY ON LABOUR. 
 
 Oft have I passed, through open door have seen 
 In cutlers' shops the grindstones whirring round. 
 With which they grind the glittering scissors keen. 
 Round go the stones with roaring sound, 
 
 Ceaselessly whirling around ; 
 And the scissors, as if they feel 
 The tooth of the stone on their ice-cold steel. 
 Shriek for their lives. 
 And the blades of the knives. 
 With patient whetting, 
 A fine edge getting. 
 Glitter and gleam 
 Like the noonday's beam. 
 And in the tool shops what array 
 Of saws and planes and chisels make display. 
 Which men sit sharpening, 'twould seem, all day, 
 Sharpening on files 
 In dingy room 
 At benches in aisles 
 Trending through the gloom — 
 Tools of all kinds, coulters, mattocks, brads, 
 Gimlets, shares, cleavers, axe and adze — 
 Sharpening on files or on grindstones whetting, 
 Immersed in toil, all else forgetting, 
 Knowing nought of hours or weather. 
 But only that there they* sit together, 
 For ever labouring at one thing, 
 Tools absorbed in sharpening. 
 Oft have I seen in Holborn High, 
 Or Drury Lane it nigh, 
 
 Such shops and others 
 Each like their brothers, 
 And full of labouring craftsmen, hard 
 At work in workshop and in yard. 
 But spirit me, Muse, far away 
 To the East End, dull and grey, 
 
 To the great factories let me go 
 In Stratford or in Bow, 
 
THE CIRCLE OF LABOUR. 41 
 
 The factories, the mills, 
 Which busy population fills, 
 
 All toilers and all poor, , 
 All glad to work, and only sad 
 VVhe work cannot be had 
 To keep the wolf and famine from the door. 
 Oh ! joy of Labour ! who but feels 
 Great joy amid a moving- scenery 
 Of wildly whirling wheels 
 And clattering machinery, 
 All in symmetric motion 
 And rolling like the ocean. 
 Or waving like a forest with its greenery ? 
 Oh ! joy of spirit 
 To inherit 
 Such portion as to always be 
 In such a world perpetually, 
 Where all the cares of every day 
 Are whelmed in the wild wheels' play, 
 All griefs are swallowed, troubles drowned 
 In their incessant roaring round. 
 Which does all soul and sense confound, 
 And makes a world of force and sound. 
 One great incarnate palpitation, 
 Which banishes sad meditation. 
 
 Amid this magic scenery 
 Of mad revolving mill machinery, 
 No care is known 
 But to see the shuttle deftly thrown, 
 
 No anxiety 
 But to catch the spindle with propriety. 
 Such little tasks are a delight. 
 And all is joy 
 Without annoy. 
 And the hours race from morn till night. 
 What joy to see the flywheel flinging 
 Its mighty orb in constant swinging, 
 To see the maze of belts round slipping. 
 Each its wheel gripping, 
 Each its wheel clipping. 
 To mark the piston with zeal intense 
 
 In and out stealing, 
 The ponderous cylinders immense 
 
 Uncouthly reeling. 
 The two iron globes which never fall, 
 But round revolve, ball after ball, 
 And from their orbit govern all — 
 
42 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 All this is joy; and they amid it, 
 Who lead a life of labour, 
 Each toiling- like his neighbour, 
 From morning's sun till night has hid it, 
 The livelong day — 
 The potency of labour they confess it. 
 
 And for its healing balm they bless it. 
 Each morn, while yet 'tis dark, 
 In houses by the thousand there is stir. 
 
 Matches are struck, and a kindling spark 
 To the faggots minister. 
 Soon tens of thousand kettles 
 Merrily are singing, 
 And the crockery rattles 
 Its humble breakfast bringing. 
 But no time is there to waste : 
 Haste ! is the word, make haste ! 
 For soon upon their ears comes stealing 
 
 The bell pealing, 
 Or the hooter blowing, 
 And from their humble dwellings going 
 Off to their work in thousands they troop, 
 Men and women in shabby group. 
 Right glad are they often to get there. 
 And lay down their loa'd of care : 
 
 Glad to go 
 When they hear the hooter blow, 
 To the factory to hie 
 
 Beneath the morning sky. 
 And glad there all the day to bide, 
 Their woes to forget, themselves to hide. 
 Glad to bide there while they may, 
 
 Although all day 
 They nothing hear, they nothing feel, 
 But the clamour 
 Of the hammer. 
 And the droning 
 And the groaning 
 Of the wheel. 
 Such are thy scenes, O Stratford, such thine. Bow, 
 Stepney and Poplar, populous Bethnal Green. 
 But o'er the murky river let me go 
 To Bermondsey — once quite another scene, 
 Where palaces arose in princely sheen. 
 But now the head resort and meeting ground 
 Of all the tanners in the town that been. 
 Here what array of tanning pits profound. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF LABOUR. 43 
 
 Tan -vats and tan yards huge on every side are found ! 
 Within, the tanners pulling at a hide 
 To wring each drop of moisture rank away, 
 Tug, leaning back, in rows on either side — 
 As when the Greeks on that tempestuous day 
 Dragged at Patroclus' body in the fray, 
 They at the feet, the Trojans at the head, 
 Each striving from their foe to wrench the prey, 
 And capture for their spoil the priceless dead : 
 
 Hither and thither rolls the grisly wrestle dread. 
 
 What tens of thousands pass their daily time — 
 
 precious time, imperial of things ! — 
 
 In cutting matchwood, or their hands begrime 
 In picking rags, which small contentment brings I 
 In Stratford-atte-Bow of evenings 
 Out of the huge match fact'ries see them, pour — 
 The toiling myriads, whom no poet sings — 
 Or where the paper mills by Deptford's shore 
 Vomit at eve their weary thousands from their door ! 
 
 1 greet ye, grimy labourers of the docks. 
 Who all day uncomplainingly abide 
 Amid the gallant vessels, which in flocks 
 Ride, sailed and pennoned, on the yellow tide, 
 Haling the goods belched from their yawning side. 
 And with enormous strength on shoulders strong 
 Heave up the coffers and the cases wide. 
 
 Then drag them stalwartly the quay along, 
 
 Perpetually toiling in a busy throng. 
 
 I greet ye, sons of Thames Street, eke as strong 
 And brawny as your brothers of the quay — 
 Such loads have I beheld you heave along, 
 To move them seemed impossible to me; 
 Then loop them up on deft machinery 
 Of swinging crane impinged on jutting joist, 
 Then skyward let them sail, O joy to see ! 
 Till high o'er seething Thames Street they were 
 hoist. 
 
 Dense with its mobs of drays and drivers vulgar-voiced. 
 But now to Fetter Lane my steps to bend, 
 Home of the pale-faced printers' brotherhood, 
 Who from all parts their daily toil attend 
 In this grim causeway and its neighbourhood, 
 Trained to set up each day their multitude 
 Of metal types in order, and so live; 
 Set up, take down, by method understood — 
 A task which can no other pleasure give 
 Than pouring useless water in a useless sieve. 
 
44 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Cross the declivities of Holborn Hill 
 From Fetter Lane, and Kirby Street is nig-h, 
 An eerie street of recollections ill. 
 Here my wild brother, luckless more than I, 
 Chose for his baffled dreams of fame to die, 
 'Twas on the right-hand side in garret high 
 But I first strove to live with effort strong. 
 That 1, to baulk the publishers' dull throng, 
 
 Vowed by myself to print my History of Song. 
 
 'Twas in a house, the self-same house, I ween, 
 'Twas in the self-same garret next the sky 
 Which such pathetic deadly scene had seen, 
 Had viewed my lovely brother blanch and die, 
 Victim of that most foul confederacy, 
 That prints such trash and puffs it to the height. 
 And only brings its own smug company. 
 The " recommended " geniuses to light — 
 
 'Twas here that he resolved to die, and I to fight. 
 Six printers from the wilds of Fetter Lane, 
 Cross Street, and Saffron Hill, I did engage. 
 And gath'ring type and plant with worlds of pain. 
 Chases and all a printer's appanage. 
 Bade them inexorable war to wage 
 On manuscript with music dotted thick. 
 Forthwith they fell to work : page after page 
 Is carried from the copy to the stick. 
 
 And meted for the press with quaint arithmetic. 
 And I worked with them, witless artisan ! 
 Oft toiling (for I needs must set the Greek) 
 Till the long hours sheer into midnight ran; 
 Then heard the stairs mysteriously creak, 
 Until at last, afraid to move or speak 
 In the dark house untenanted and bare, 
 I ceased ; and groping through the passage bleak 
 In fear descended every creaking stair, 
 
 Lest the appealing ghost of Chatterton were there. 
 But I, alas ! well nigh was on the way 
 To e'en become unfortunate as he. 
 The printers worked and shirked, asked double pay^ 
 Drank, idled, cheated and insulted me; 
 And I unskilled in such emergency. 
 Without resources, knew not what to do. 
 And grew at last to sore perplexity. 
 Debts, duns and demons, diabolic crew ! 
 
 Came and enveloped me in trouble and in rue. 
 Then might I eke in sore distress have died, 
 But, Ann, thou would'st not let me perish so. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF LABOUR. 45 
 
 But from a slender hoard, which thou didst hide, 
 Thou earnest with thy all to heal my woe. 
 The thrift of years thou freely didst bestow, 
 And ten crisp notes into my lap didst cast. 
 How I did thank thee, God can only know, 
 O saintly figure in a vanished past, 
 Whose image is my best, and will remain my last. 
 
 THE DIAMOND CUTTERS OF HATTON 
 GARDEN. 
 
 Thus was it then with Chatterton and me — 
 He died, I fought, and both knew utter misery 
 In that dire street of woe and poverty. 
 Meanwhile at our back, 
 To be seen through a crack 
 Of tattered blind, 
 A> if in mockery behind 
 Lay Hatton Garden and its purlieus cold. 
 Where half the jewels of the world are bought and sold, 
 Where sacks of diamonds glittter bright 
 With flaming flashes of lurid light. 
 Where are stones of priceless worth, 
 
 The choicest of the earth, 
 That in value overwhelm 
 
 The riches of a realm — 
 This was at our back, and behind 
 The fight with death and poverty enfolded by the blind. 
 And he who walks these purlieus strange. 
 As onward he doth range, 
 Through window after window will espy the sight 
 Of lapidaries wrapped in aprons white 
 Cutting stones all starry bright. 
 Round go the lathes, 
 And the diamond scintillating 
 With its flashing glitter bathes 
 The cutting tool rotating. 
 In many a rainbow prism 
 With skilful mechanism 
 Do they carve the gems of beauty, 
 Often dust of emery sprinkling 
 On the lovely brilliant twinkling. 
 And bending o'er their duty. 
 
 Industriously : 
 
46 THE EPIC OF LONDON, 
 
 Illustriously 
 Their noble art pursuing-; 
 The simple gem undoing, . 
 But transforming- it 
 . And re-forming- it 
 To a shape of matchless wonder, 
 
 A very world of lig-ht, ' 
 
 Like the flash that brings the thunder. 
 So dazzling and so bright. 
 And the diamonds in the store-rooms ready dight, 
 Now finished and alight, 
 Cut in hexagons and angles 
 Hang in sheafs of dazzling lustre 
 
 In scintillating cluster, 
 Or in coils of sprays and spangles, 
 Destined chaplets for the tangies 
 Of some royal golden hair, 
 
 Or with a rope of splendour 
 To clasp a neck most tender, 
 Milkwhite and fair. 
 And this was at our back, and behind 
 The fight with death and poverty enfolded by the blind. 
 What wealth was there, where one might own 
 A kingdom in a single stone ! 
 Behind was wealth and gems imperial. 
 Before was death and woe funereal. 
 But the sweet song of him who fell bv fate so cruel 
 Was worth more than the world's most priceless jewel. 
 
 CANTO VI. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF PLEASURE. 
 
 Now far from hence exhausted will I roam 
 To proud Pall Mall and brave St. James's Street, 
 Where cloyed voluptuaries have their home. 
 Where pampered epicures in soft retreat 
 
THE CIRCLE OF PLEASURE. 47 
 
 Ponder the tastes and properties of meat, 
 Where gourmands and bon vivants, sipping- slow 
 Their claret, dawdle o'er their banquets sweet, 
 Where nought is known of hunger, want, and woe — 
 To Pall Mall and St. James's let me haste to g-o. 
 In lordly line the club-houses arise. 
 
 The Carlton, Athenaeum, Brooks's Club, 
 The great Reform which with the Carlton vies. 
 The mansion fair which men The Travellers' dub, 
 The Junior Carlton, famed offshoot and shrub 
 Of the great parent. Boodle's, Arthur's, White's — 
 In all which places men may elbows rub 
 With scores of peers and noblemen at nights. 
 And pass their wasted time in leisure and delights. 
 Yet in all these, while many rooms abound — 
 Rooms? Call them halls ! so spacious and so bold. 
 With fitting pilasters which rear around, 
 .And fretted roofs exuberant with gold. 
 They spread and loom aloft in pomp untold. 
 More like the halls in kingly palace found, 
 Than what to private eyes their charms unfold — 
 Yet in all these, Vv'hile many rooms abound. 
 Is there one room whose might all others doth confound : 
 Is there one room that's ever held the chief, 
 The room which cooks laboriously use 
 To seethe the savouries and dress the beef. 
 Kitchen, fair nursery of saps and stews. 
 To chant thy charms I here invoke my Muse. 
 Thy fragrant smell, which many a club pervades, 
 Bespeaketh sensuous joys, which none refuse. 
 What if grim anarchy earth, heav'n invades ? 
 Thy empire is supreme, like Pluto's in the Shades. 
 Once a club kitchen I beheld, and saw. 
 Turning and toasting upon spits of wire, 
 'leal^ widgeons, snipe, fowls, pheasants, trussed 
 
 and raw : 
 While joints of meat in magnitude entire 
 Were roasting fragrantly before the fire. 
 Meanwhile immersed in reverie profound 
 Sat cooks, who from the common herd retiie, 
 Bent to make sauce the palate to astound. 
 Or sweet and toothsome cates with cunning to com- 
 pound. 
 From thence exported to the upper air 
 Dishes and meats of delicacy rare 
 Are sorted out in sumptuous bills of fare, 
 
THE EPIC OF LONDON. 48 
 
 Spread upon tables decked beyond compare 
 With snow-white linen, flowers, a very glare 
 Of glittering glass and silver; where engrossed 
 Upon their fair repast in sumptuous chair 
 Sit gentry, all good judges of a roast; 
 
 For eating, drinking, ease, are what they prize the most. 
 For hours in gastronomic ecstasy, 
 Seasoning their repast wtih prattle trite. 
 Through dish and dish they plough complacently, 
 In tastes and flavours taking their delight — 
 Pleasure, pale goddess, spread with spangles bright. 
 Thy empire is in London ; and thy reign 
 Beginneth with the gleaming stars at night. 
 Come, let me haste away from pleasures plain, 
 
 To scenes v here to expand myself I more am fain. 
 
 A RHAPSODY ON PLEASURE AND 
 CHAMPAGNE. 
 
 Come, let me haste away 
 To other scenes and other places. 
 Where women fair display 
 
 Their charms and graces, 
 And in enchanting witchery are seen 
 To add a lustre to the scene, 
 The lustre fair of sparkling eyes 
 And rippling smiles and ringlets curled. 
 Which far outvies 
 All lights, all flowers, all glitter in the world. 
 
 Spirit me, Muse, to some such scene, 
 Unto the Carlton, most divine hotel, 
 
 Where banquets most imperial been. 
 Or to the Metropole I knew so well. 
 
 Or to some club's luxurious centre, 
 Where ladies have the privilege to enter. 
 Here at many a table through the room 
 Fragrant with blossoms and perfume, 
 They may be seen 
 Sitting with noble mien 
 And the manners of a queen. 
 
 Like houries they seem 
 In their dress, a gauzy dream 
 
THE CIRCLE OF PLEASURE. 49 
 
 Of lace and silk 
 As white as milk. 
 And their fair white arms 
 And their neck with all its charms 
 
 Seen behind the flowers 
 All our nature overpowers ; 
 
 And their fair faces flushing 
 And beautifully blushing 
 With the influence of the wine 
 Makes them look like goddesses divine, 
 To intoxicate our sense 
 
 And drive our reason hence, 
 That like slaves we yearn to fall, 
 A willing thrall 
 To their sweet influence. 
 Great Champagne, O cup divine, 
 More a nectar than a wine, 
 Sent from a paradise celestial 
 
 To cheer our race terrestrial, 
 To fire us, 
 To inspire us. 
 To make our care 
 Vanish into air, 
 
 Our weary trouble 
 Burst like a bubble. 
 And ourselves in imagination 
 
 Monarchs of creation, 
 Gods and goddesses awhile, 
 As we smile, 
 As we laugh 
 And the foaming nectar quaff. 
 Out goes the cork, with a magic pop, 
 
 Up springs the wine in sparkling drop. 
 And the foam white as cream 
 Rises up like steam. 
 And its effervescing. 
 Promises the blessing 
 Which will surely follow, 
 If the cup you swallow. 
 For with quaffing of the wine 
 Comes a mass of feelings fine, 
 Of thoughts celestial 
 Above our state terrestrial, 
 
 Of heavenly fire, 
 Of divine desire — 
 
 These come to fill us 
 And to thrill us 
 And to lift us 
 
50 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 And to drift us 
 To a world quite another, 
 To the region of Champagne, 
 
 Where everything is other 
 Than on prosy earth so plain ; 
 Where our better selves give w^ay. 
 
 And we say "Yea" for "Nay", 
 For Yea is the word of freedom, it is plain, 
 And we — 
 We are free ! 
 And Nay is unknown in the regions of Champagne. 
 Hail to thee ! blithe wine, 
 Nectar most divine, 
 There is magic in thy pop, 
 There is balm in thy drop. 
 And thy hissing effervescing 
 Gives the promise of a blessmg, 
 Thy companions are fair women, 
 
 Roses and flowers. 
 Thou dost set the senses swimming. 
 And golden are thy hours. 
 
 THE RHAPSODY (continued). 
 
 Hence let us away to further pleasure. 
 To rapture beyond measure. 
 To the realms where music spreads its spell, 
 Sweet Muse propitious ! 
 And pours its soul-enchanting swell 
 
 Of tone delicious ; 
 To where some orchestra sonorous 
 
 Floods the whole hall with sound. 
 Or where some vast embattled chorus 
 
 Peals forth its fugue profound. 
 And through the vault with thunder riven, 
 Lifts us on Handel's wings to heaven ; 
 Or where some sweet melodious singer 
 Entreats us on her notes to linger. 
 And list to her sweet fiorituras and roulades, 
 
 Her nightingale-like trill. 
 Her diamond-dropping notes and sweet cascades 
 
 Our souls that thrill. 
 Perchance 'tis the eternal Patti ever young. 
 
 This evening who hath sung. 
 Or Melba from Australia afar, 
 Sweet nightingale, 
 Who doth our ears regale. 
 Or else be off to Concert " Popular," 
 
THE CIRCLE OF PLEASURE. 51 
 
 Where some German or Pole 
 With fingers bounceable 
 And name unpronounceable 
 Pours fourth notes in endless shoal. 
 While through the hall, luxuriously installed, 
 
 Rows of men prematurely bald 
 Sit silent and utterly appalled 
 
 At his transcendent skill ; 
 At which they feel no thrill 
 Because their minds are thinking, 
 While their eyes are blinking, 
 Of the business of the day. 
 And they wish they were away — 
 At home in bed 
 Resting their sleepy head, 
 Or at the club 
 Drinking rum shrub. 
 
 Smoking, 
 And lazily joking — 
 
 Anywhere, 
 They do not care, 
 So as not at a concert they were — 
 A concert slow 
 For which they have no passion, 
 
 And merely go 
 Because it is the fashion. 
 Or with surer hope of pleasure 
 
 Let us spend our leisure 
 At the theatres, v/hich in scores 
 Woo us with open doors 
 
 To enter m 
 Ere the plays begin. 
 To boxes, stalls or circle. 
 In a bevy they encircle 
 
 The busy Strand, 
 That happy land. 
 Of actors and of actresses in legion, 
 That most artistic region — 
 Whither let us go to-night. 
 
 The theatres glitter bright 
 On every eve except the Sunday, 
 And any day we may choose our play. 
 
 What shall we say ? 
 Shall it be a comedy by Sydney Grundy 
 Or a piece pitched in higher tones 
 From the soberer Muse of Jones, 
 Or by Pinero who so well has writ ? 
 Or shall it be our prince of wit, 
 
52 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Our master of all art, 
 From whom we ne'er will pjut, 
 Great Shakespeare, England's joy and pride ? — 
 As he was played, when in full tide 
 Of his renown 
 Henry Irving, 
 Actor most deserving, 
 Led the Lyceum and the town : 
 Or when Drury Lane was in its glory, 
 An epoch now quite hoary, 
 And Augustus the Great 
 Ruled in state, 
 What pomp, what pageants, what processions 
 In multitudinous progressions 
 Filled the stage ! 
 What scenes Elysian 
 Met our vision, 
 And marvels hopeless to presage I 
 
 Take me, O Muse, 
 Melpomene on thee I call. 
 To the theatres in the Strand and its purlieus. 
 All, would I visit, all. 
 For I know all full well ; 
 Of all can pleasant stories tell — 
 The brave Lyceum, thy especial shrine, 
 And close at hand The Gaiety, 
 Where thy sister Muse divine. 
 Nimble-limbed Terpsichore, 
 Sports herself in ecstasy, 
 Terry's, The Strand and Vaudeville, 
 Which obey Thalia's will, 
 The saturnine Adelphi, eke thine home. 
 And if we onward roam. 
 The Lyric, where Euterpe lingers 
 Amid a crowd of coryphees and singers. 
 And then in multitudinous succession, 
 All of the same profession. 
 The Comedy, Apollo, Avenue, 
 The Haymarket, His Majesty's, The New, 
 Wyndham's, The Prince's, Drury Lane and Daly's, 
 St. James's, Duke of York's — and still the tale is 
 They come ! one theatre after other. 
 Each vying with its brother. 
 Each full, each glittering. 
 With audiences tittering. 
 
 The homes of mirth and laughter. 
 Where we unbend ourselves ; and after 
 Stream into the night 
 
THE CIRCLE OF PLEASURE. 53 
 
 'Neath the electric light. 
 Into the night and the crowd 
 And the hum that roars aloud 
 Of cabs and carriages rolling along, 
 And thick foot traffic in current strong. 
 
 Through which passing, our way making. 
 Many a risky crossing taking, 
 We reach our favourite supper room, 
 A bright oasis in the gloom, 
 
 Some choice retreat 
 In Leicester Square, 
 Or rakish Regent Street, 
 Where we may have such fare ! 
 What shall it be ? Say, shall we royster 
 At supper of oyster. 
 With stout and bread and butter. 
 Or with chablis as our tipple. 
 
 Whose pale and pleasant ripple 
 Sets the spirits in a flutter ? 
 Or would you rather lobster salad. 
 Concocted here with such success 
 'Twould need a perfect ballad 
 Its praises to express. 
 Such dainty shreds of lettuce, and such claws 
 To satiate our famished jaws ! 
 
 Such vinegar, such dressing I 
 It is an unmixed blessing. 
 To sit you down and eat. 
 Or there across the road 
 Is another hostel where Beef a la mode 
 Is the morceau de resistance and unmitigated treat. 
 Or if 'tis chops and steaks and devils 
 You would fancy for your revels. 
 
 Then there are houses many^ — - 
 You are fairly safe with any. 
 And would that there was one, which all surpassed ! 
 O Evans's, sweet home of ministrelsy, 
 
 Now vanished in the past. 
 Once how delectable wert thou to me I 
 Well I remember in my impish Youth, 
 When fresh from college 
 With but little knowledge 
 Of the world and the ways of truth. 
 To me was Evans s a blissful vision, 
 
 A scene Elysian, 
 Where I spent my idle moments night by night. 
 And I listened to the boys, 
 And their pretty noise 
 
54 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Of glees and carols with unfeigned delight, 
 And the music of their singing 
 
 Is in my fears still ringing, 
 As I sit, a banished exile, and these elegies indite. 
 
 And thus it is life passes ; 
 
 And in a world of asses, 
 The better men must go, and let the asses have their right. 
 
 But not alone the pleasures of the night — 
 To other scenes would I myself transport. 
 Where genial London oft doth take delight — 
 And haply London of the middle sort : 
 To Richmond and Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, 
 To shady Rosherville's delightfull dell, 
 The fairy Exhibitions of Earl's Court, 
 Where promenades and supper please us well, 
 But chiefly to one scene, which does all else excel. 
 
 Great Crystal Palace, home of art and song, 
 Well I remember many an idle day 
 Pacing thy fair and stuccoed courts along. 
 Among Greek gods and heroes passed away. 
 Through Moorish courts, whose arabesque display 
 Mimicked the grand Alham_bra in its pride, 
 Through Babylonian squares at large which lay 
 With frescoes, sculptures, ranged on either side. 
 And tiers of feathered bulls, with wings expanded wide. 
 
 And oft amid a medieval aisle 
 Of Gothic architecture strange, grotesque. 
 Where lost in thought I lingered for awhile 
 Brooding upon the picture statuesque, 
 I heard the organ-player at his desk 
 Peal in full flood reverberating sound. 
 Which floated through the alcove picturesque. 
 Transfiguring the stuccoed carvings round. 
 And conjuring within me fancies strange profound. 
 
 What is it when great Handel comes to life 
 Each treble year, and buoyed on pinions brave. 
 Lifts us afar bove mortal woe and strife ? 
 Then thousands throng the orchestra's fair cave. 
 And tens of thousands fill the mighty nave. 
 Up goes the baton ! outward bursts the sound. 
 Filling the Palace with a rolling wave 
 Voluminously thundering around. 
 Great Handel lives again, with ageless laurels crowned. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF PLEASURE. 55 
 
 Shall I not linger too upon that scene 
 So fair, so fairy, like enchanted dream. 
 When the delightful gardens grey and green 
 With lights and lamps illuminated beam ? 
 Bewitching is the scene, bewitching seem 
 The ladies' toilettes, white and pink and blue 
 And bright vermilion, movmg in a stream 
 Through tree and bower and verdant avenue. 
 To one on Palace terrace drinking in the view. 
 
 And on packed TTiursday nights on evenings still, 
 What pleasure-seekers throng the Palace grounds, 
 What pyrotechnic miracles of skill, 
 What fiery spectacle our gaze astounds, 
 What comets, rockets on their airy rounds 
 Bursting in silver spray to fall below. 
 What candles, crackers charged with crackling sound?, 
 What Catherine wheels, and sheets of sheen aglow, 
 Which landscapes, battles, ships, in fiery portrait show ! 
 
 This sees the gaping crowd. Then they break up. 
 And back to London take their homeward way. 
 Where they disperse delighted, some to sup. 
 Some to fresh pleasure at the latest play, 
 Or else with greater joy to wend their way 
 To glittering music hall, where Marie Lloyd, 
 Sam Redfern, Herbert Campbell chant their lay, 
 And with " The White-eyed Kaffir " is employed 
 Dan Leno of whose song is London never cloyed. 
 
 Here may we in their romps The Two Macks see, 
 May hear The Vital Spark and Little Tich, 
 Tennyson and O'Gorman's drollery — 
 Nay, pace the town from Ealing to Shoreditch, 
 In music halls it is surprising rich — 
 So much that all observers will agree, 
 That London has for music halls an itch. 
 The Oxford, Empire, Holborn, Tivoli, 
 Palace, Pavilion — say, what better could we see ? 
 
 But now 'tis late at jnight and London tired, 
 With pleasure blase, and with business vexed. 
 And after all the " turns, " we have inquired, 
 " Where — what excitement can we witness next " ? 
 And thus as we interrogate perplexed, 
 A friend suggests 'tis just eleven o'clock, 
 And to Die Empire's programme is annexed 
 One of the ballets generally in stock : 
 Whither through cabs and crowds with footsteps fleet we flock. 
 
56 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 A BALLET AT THE EMPIRE. 
 
 Into a fairy scene — 
 Are we precipitated now, I ween — 
 Into a mass of glittering light 
 From chandeliers like stalactite. 
 Into a crowded house, where costumes gay 
 In moving masses make display. 
 But far o'erpassing, 
 This sight surpassing 
 And the cynosure which does all eyes engage 
 Is the pageant of the stage. 
 
 Here in landscapes bright. 
 All alive with light, 
 Houries disport themselves, 
 And airily comport themselves, 
 With twinkling feet, 
 Which the stage perpetually beat 
 In pretty time 
 To the music's rhyme. 
 And with uplifted limbs, 
 At the sight of which the fancy swims, 
 
 Down the stage come dancing. 
 And advancing 
 In troop and line — 
 In tripping troop 
 And ambling group. 
 Or in lovely line 
 Of poses most divine 
 Of limber breasts and arms 
 Revealing full voluptuous charms. 
 They come tripping 
 And beautifully skipping 
 In cortege 
 Down the stage. 
 Or in giddy whirl. 
 Girl with girl. 
 Their arms enlaced 
 Round each other's waist, 
 One another facing 
 
 And close embracing. 
 With their feet busy 
 In motion dizzy. 
 Round and round they swim. 
 Till the eyes grow dim 
 With following their flight so fleet 
 And their ever twinkling feet. 
 And as they dance, the radiant bowers. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF PLEASURE. 57 
 
 Fragrant and fresh with flowers, 
 Are lit with hues in rainbow showers, 
 Which fall around them beaming 
 And gleaming. 
 And streaming, 
 All the colours of a prism. 
 Orange, red and rainbow hue, 
 
 Lighting their limbs so lissom, 
 As they dance delighted through. 
 Then one steps out 
 From the mazy rout, 
 A fairy 
 She. 
 And with step as airy 
 As a fairy's e'er would be. 
 All fays and coryphees she doth surpass. 
 
 She scarcely seems to touch the ground, 
 Or falls with the sound 
 Of a rose on the grass. 
 
 All stand still 
 As she dances at will 
 O'er the arena empty and bare. 
 
 Bounding and springmg. 
 Like gossamer flinging 
 Or butterfly winging 
 Its flight through the air. 
 So goes the ballet. 
 The dancers now rally, 
 And hither and thither the measures they tread. 
 Scattering roses 
 In beautiful posies. 
 Or ribbons enweaving 
 With patterns deceiving. 
 As round a fair maypole in circles they thread. 
 The throng is now denser. 
 The dancing intenser; 
 Some fairies to cloudland by magic are drawn ; 
 Shells, fairies concealing, 
 Them open revealing ; 
 And all are in beautiful band on the lawn. 
 *Tis gorgeous, 'tis certain — 
 But down comes the curtain ! 
 And we must be off to get home by the dawn. 
 
58 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 CANTO VII. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF VICE. 
 
 Vice, ghastly goddess, rouged and ghastly white. 
 Thy empire is in London ; and thy reign 
 Beginneth with the sparkling stars at night. 
 What are the offerings for which thou'rt fain ? 
 Are they not ruined homes, which drink doth drain 
 Of substance, and make hellish by its brawls — ■ 
 Are they not (Oh ! those bitter sinks of pain ! ) 
 Lost virtues, which no effort ere recalls ? 
 (Thou dost sardonically laugh when each girl falls.) 
 
 Are not thy offerings women, lovely, young. 
 Who fall from cherubs to be devils dire, 
 With oaths and maledictions on their tongue ? 
 Dost not as choicest sacrifice require 
 The wives, weak victims of a drunkard's ire. 
 Or those whom cowardly gamesters day by day 
 Starve and illtreat, and walow in their mire. 
 Till they have gambled all the home away, 
 Then turn upon with oaths, and, brutal, bruise or slay ? 
 
 But worse the first — worst, lovely woman down ! 
 Thou comest to great London, and thou sayest : 
 " Thee will I bring a daily dole, great town, 
 A daily dole of maidens whom thou mayeft 
 Use at thy pleasure, when at love thou played." 
 And thus to feed the vice on which thou doateS, 
 Vile pimp and pander, procuress debased. 
 Thou filled London with thy filth, and bloated 
 Him with the weeping offerings o'er which thou gloateA. 
 
 THE SONG OF LONDON. 
 
 For London's song is ever one, 
 A runic rhyme that ne'er is done — 
 " I muft have girls 
 With golden curls. 
 To soil. 
 To spoil. 
 To glut my luil, 
 And throw in the duft — 
 Have them I muft. 
 I mu^ have maids 
 With hair in braids. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF VICE. 59 
 
 To love, to hurt, 
 To drag in the dirt- — 
 
 To slake my lu^, 
 
 Have them I muSt. 
 
 Bring them in legions. 
 
 From all regions. 
 
 From sunny Kent 
 
 Let them be sent. 
 
 The blue-eyed girls 
 With their hair in curls, 
 To have my desire. 
 And drag in the mire. 
 From hilly Surrey 
 Here let them hurry. 
 
 Them I require 
 To set me on fire 
 
 With fierce emotion, 
 
 Which m an ocean 
 
 Thrills my vaS: breail 
 
 From eaft to weft." 
 
 Then people say ; 
 
 *' Nay, monfter, nay ! 
 
 Wilt thou not ftill 
 
 Thy lawless will. 
 
 Thou Moloch dire 
 
 Of fierce desire ? 
 
 Still, quench thy passion 
 
 In seemly fashion. 
 Grip, grip thy longings with a vice, 
 And live a life as chafte as ice — 
 As chafte as ice, as pure as snow — 
 Let innocent, sweet maidens go. 
 
 Spare them, oh, spare 
 
 The young and fair ! " 
 
 But to these cries 
 London replies : 
 " I muft have girls 
 With golden curls. 
 
 To soil. 
 
 To spoil. 
 To glut my luft, 
 And throw in the duft — 
 Have them I muft. 
 I muft have maids 
 With hair in braids. 
 To love, to hurt, 
 
60 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 To drag in the dirt — 
 
 To cool my luft, 
 
 Have them I mu^. 
 From the hills and dales 
 
 Of pleasant Wales, 
 
 Where they draw water, 
 
 The farmer's daughter, 
 
 The peasant maiden 
 
 With cowslips laden. 
 
 Girls at play 
 In the meadows all day — 
 
 Here let them haSe, 
 
 All fair and cha^e 
 For me to defile, 
 
 And make them vile, 
 
 And then to spurn 
 
 In heartless turn, 
 
 And all forgot 
 
 To let them rot. 
 
 From Yorkshire wafte, 
 
 From Sussex Down, 
 
 Let them ha^e 
 
 All up to town. 
 From Cumbrian moors, where 'mid the sleet 
 They trip with white and fairy feet — 
 Let them come where'er they be. 
 Chosen offerings unto me, 
 For me to riot without measure 
 And use them princely at my pleasure. 
 
 Send them all 
 
 At my call — 
 
 Girls of twenty. 
 
 Send them in plenty. 
 Bashful girls of sweet fifteen. 
 With blushing cheeks and timid mien, 
 Girls of sixteen, girls of eleven. 
 To give me but a minute of Heaven — 
 To me a minute of Heaven, and — well, 
 To them a livelong life of Hell ! " 
 
 Troth, I have heard, and thus I write it here — 
 
 The maidens who are ruined and made vile 
 
 In vicious London in a single year, 
 
 Yet enter it all pure and free from guile — 
 
 Would reach in dire procession sixty mile. 
 
 In twos and twos, and walking hand in hand. 
 
 Here, here, they come with many a winning smile. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF VICE. 61 
 
 Maidens from every quarter of the land, 
 Doomed to be offered up at London's dire command. 
 
 How fair they are, those maidens fair and young I 
 What lightsome fteps, what swimming eyes of blue ! 
 What artless prattle is on every tongue. 
 To whom the world and life are Grange and new ! 
 Each face is sweeter, fresher to the view. 
 Like their own flowerets, they their charms disclose. 
 Their fair and curling hair of sunny hue. 
 Their cheeks that put to shame the blushing rose — 
 Yet all to bring them nought but misery and woes. 
 
 Long is the dire procession ; and they walk 
 With girlish, childish ge^ures, side by side. 
 And as they walk, on trifles light they talk. 
 Some ftop at times to pluck the daisies pied. 
 Which woo their fancy on the pathway side. 
 Some are so young, their hair alluringly 
 Hangs down their back, with pretty ribbon tied. 
 And their short dress but reaches to their knee — 
 And thus the line extends from London to the sea. 
 
 THE PROCESSION IN REGENT STREET. 
 
 So do they enter London pure and cha^e. 
 The whole year round moves the procession in. 
 Would you in London find them } Ha^e, 
 And meet them in the ways of sin — 
 Seek them in Regent street, Soho, 
 The Strand, and find them fallen, low, 
 A motley mob diseased and dirty, 
 Of any age from twelve to thirty. 
 
 What procession 
 In endless succession ! 
 
 London's disgrace ! 
 
 The whole world's shame ! 
 
 We hide our face 
 At the very name. 
 But we mu^ meet it — here it comes, 
 This dire upheaval of the slums ! 
 Here come the girls, gay, bad and bold, 
 Desiring only to be sold. 
 And offering up their body's treasure 
 To any idle passer's pleasure. 
 With becks and winks and nods and signs 
 TTiey stream along in lines and lines, 
 Full of ogles, smiles and leers, 
 
62 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 To captivate their dears, 
 And to entice 
 Their buyers to enhance the price. 
 Alas ! poor women, well they know 
 The tricks of that dire market, where they are on show. 
 
 They stream and stream, and one great wave 
 Spreads swimming o'er the flags which pave 
 The Strand, Long Acre, Leicester Square, 
 Coventry Street ('tis thickest there), 
 Down Regent Street in volume flowing. 
 Through Oxford Street in very torrent going — 
 
 O sight of terror 
 
 Slough of error. 
 This vortex foul of London's vice ! 
 Oh ! Christ, immortal God, Thou seest 
 The fruits of all Thy sacrifice 
 
 And conflid; glorious ! 
 And sorrowfully Thou agreest 
 The Devil still exults victorious. 
 Oh ! ye who could so well have been 
 Sisters sweet and lovers dear — 
 Now rotting in the ways of sin. 
 
 What do ye here ? 
 Are ye not better dead or dying 
 Than your unhallowed calling plying ? 
 Perish that body once so pure ! 
 Tis foul and loathsome as a sewer- 
 Not worth the keeping. 
 
 Better be sleeping 
 Under the turf in churchyard laid. 
 
 Sleeping in death, 
 
 Without that breath 
 Which helps you follow such fearful trade. 
 
 Far from riot, 
 
 Scife and quiet 
 In the peaceful ground, 
 
 Where no sound 
 
 Of brutal jest 
 
 Or jeer obscene 
 
 Breaks the rest 
 
 Beneath the green. 
 Such are the girls whom London keeps 
 
 To serve its leisure 
 
 And its pleasure. 
 And everywhere they are in heaps 
 And multitudes withouten measure. 
 Dean Street and Greek Street know them well. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF VICE. 63 
 
 These are some of the gates of Hell, 
 
 With beds and houses by the score — 
 
 You can't go wrong at any door. 
 
 All through the slums of sad Soho, 
 In Brompton and in faded Pimlico, 
 
 They burrow, English girls and foreign, 
 
 Like rabbits burrowing in a warren. 
 
 And here go gentlemen nightly. 
 Who take life lightly, 
 Their passions to amuse 
 With those who ne'er refuse ; 
 
 Who ne'er refuse to take a guinea, 
 
 And give a kiss to any ninny. 
 
 So I have heard that many girls begin. 
 If gentlemen have ruined them, who float 
 Buoyed up with money on the floods of sin. 
 In handsome style, like ladies of some note. 
 With brougham, jewels over which they gloat, 
 And all that makes life, if not happy, gay. 
 Then comes a day, not ver>' far remote, 
 When they offend the cur, who made them stray. 
 And then their tide of fortune fleetly ebbs away. 
 
 From one to other in the filthy slough 
 Handed and banded, they are passed about. 
 Now one man's mistress, and another's now. 
 And pleasing none for long ; for all men doubt 
 And spurn the fallen woman whom they flout. 
 Then must they helplessly the pavement tread — 
 O stony stepdame, with thy cheerless rout ! 
 Thus must they nightly pace to gain their bread. 
 Though hail, sleet, fog and rain may charge the heaven 
 o'erhead. 
 
 Lurking in bye-streets you may meet them then, 
 In corners dark, as crouching there for shame. 
 Planted in ambuscade to catch the men. 
 Whom they accost by some endearing name. 
 And try with base allurements to imflame. 
 Last stage of all (for lower sink they yet). 
 When death and fell disease its prey doth claim. 
 Like ghosts in lonely roads they may be met. 
 Their breath with brandy reeks, their clothing torn and 
 wet. 
 
 Oh ! Brandy, and Oh ! Whiskey, precious twain. 
 Responsible for much, yet to the sad 
 
64 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 And deep distressed oft solacing their pain. 
 And saving them from criminal or mad. 
 Making them for a space elate and glad 
 TTiat they forget a little while their woe — 
 Since such medicament is to be had. 
 Perhaps in charity 'tis belter so, 
 And the blest pair in peace upon their way may go. 
 
 But would you see them at their orgies fair. 
 Making of London Pandemonium ? 
 Oh ! then to Oxford Circus we'll repair. 
 And threading through the traffic and the hum 
 Into the bars and public houses come. 
 And see in thousands men and women here 
 Lounging as if in an Elysium, 
 Drinking in endless sips ale, stout and beer. 
 Brandy and whiskey, rum, and gin as water clear. 
 
 Who can compute the public houses dense, 
 Which line great London's ways from end to 6nd ? 
 Why, they would make if they were lifted hence, 
 A goodly city, or they would extend, 
 Ranked side by side, from London to Land's End. 
 To these do flocking thousands nightly steal. 
 With oft but little in their hands to spend. 
 Yet they will e'en deny themselver a meal. 
 So that they homewards may, brimful of liquor, reel. 
 
 Oh ! what delight is that, what pleasure base, 
 To tope and tipple till the brain grows dim. 
 And the thick blood clots purple in the face ! 
 Then to continue till the eyeballs swim, 
 And numbing torpor seises every limb. 
 The agile tongue, in lethargy 'tis sunk. 
 No longer can it trill its accents trim. 
 Angelic man into a beast has shrunk. 
 The beast is past reclaim, and hopelessly dead drunk. 
 
 Then doth he stagger forth — nor he alone. 
 
 But out of myriad public houses reel 
 
 Drunkards in thousands, when the fatal tone 
 
 Of twanging twelve through London's " pubs " doth 
 
 peal. 
 Then are the shutters shut ; and outward heel 
 The staggering crew, who soaking there have been — 
 The men to curse and quarrel, and to deal 
 Blind reckless blows ; the women to begin, 
 Sure sequel to the drink, unchastity and sin. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF VICE. 65 
 
 Yet would I fain prefer this rowdy crew. 
 Heated, uproarious, and quarrelsome. 
 To those sly visitants of pallid hue. 
 Who in and outward of the chemists' come, 
 Indulging their proclivities for some 
 Strange drug or opiate their nerves to calm ; 
 Ether, or morphia, or laudanum. 
 Or dire cocaine, or caffeine — sovereign balm ! 
 To do withouten which would cost them many a qualm. 
 
 For I have heard if once the taste begin, 
 And man or woman doth become its slave. 
 No power on earth can cure the silent sin, 
 And the poor victim from its clutches save — 
 But he or she must take it to the grave. 
 Whither at no long time they destined are, 
 For, horror ! more and more they daily crave 
 Of the fell drug which doth their being mar. 
 And death with agonising tortures is not far. 
 
 Poor spectacles of crushed humanity ! 
 Oft have I watched them stealing in and out 
 Of druggists* stores in seethy Oxford Street. 
 Well did I know them by their air of doubt 
 And faltering with which they looked about. 
 To see that none they knew, them saw go in 
 For the fell drug they cannot live without. 
 And I have heard, this panacea to win. 
 They shrink at neither lies, fraud, treachery, nor sin. 
 
 Sooth would I eke, as I prefer the drunk 
 To these smug patrons of a secret vice — ■ 
 Sooth would I eke place high the women sunk 
 In fell unfeminine debaucheries — 
 The harlots would I rate at higher price 
 Over the men who scented, curled and dyed. 
 Stroll leering, other men for to entice. 
 In Piccadilly may they be espied, 
 Or where the great Criterion's gates swing open wide. 
 
 These dire exponents of a classic sin 
 In Athens — (and in London ! ) — too well known, 
 Abound in our dear capital, and win 
 Each year a larger following for their own. 
 Alack ! by London's sons too well 'tis known 
 What houses such a clientele contain. 
 Where boys, not girls, in harems are bestown. 
 Where men, not women, dally, and maintain 
 The vice, the curse which razed the Cities of the Plain. 
 
66 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 But one vice more — though many yet there be, 
 One vice alone can I find breath to speak. 
 Such lengthy catalogue hath wearied me. 
 To see it to its end am I too w^eak. 
 A hundred talking tongues must I bespeak, 
 And with the tongues a hundred mouths as well. 
 A voice of iron sonorous must I seek, 
 To cry, reverberating like a bell, 
 What vices rage and make great London like a helL 
 
 Gambling, of all vices vile that rage 
 Most prosy, grubbing, commonplace, and stale. 
 In this most prosy, money-ridden age. 
 Thou spreadest forth thy canvas with full sail. 
 And to all passengers thou biddest Hail ! 
 The vice is at its zenith now in town. 
 They sit in clubs and play with faces pale, 
 Not pounds and shillings only planking down. 
 But houses, castles, lands, estates and fair renown. 
 
 What battles there you nightly may survey, 
 To which the steward of their poor estate 
 Serves as the bottle-holder in the fray ! 
 Whether 'tis bridge or hazard or roulette. 
 Whether on cards or dice or checks they bet, 
 'Tis all the same — at each upset of luck 
 First drops a house to careful tenants let. 
 Next fades a farm with many a cow and duck. 
 Next an estate melts sheer in air — and joins the ruck. 
 
 Smaller and smaller does the rent-roll grow. 
 Madder and madder does the gambler get, 
 Till he is plunged in an abyss of woe. 
 Say, is 't not utter madness thus to bet 
 Fortunes away in moments short, and yet 
 To some poor hanger-on to grudge a shilling ? 
 For these wild spendthrifts of the gambling set 
 Are yet as mean as misers, and quite willing 
 To cheat a cabman, bilk a boots, and ' cob ' the shilling ! 
 
 Lower the dens which in Soho are found — 
 Till now in Piccadilly have we been. 
 Pall Mall, St. James's, gambling's classic ground — 
 But would you see the seethings of the sin, 
 To those low dens you e'en must enter in, 
 When late at night in chambers reeking ill, 
 Apprentices and shopmen lose and win 
 Halfpence and pence and shillings with good will, 
 And to support their luck next rob their masters* till. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF CRIME. 67 
 
 CANTO VIII. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF CRIME. 
 
 Crime, hideous skeleton of dread affright, 
 Thy empire is in London ; and thy reign 
 Beginneth with the glimmering stars at night. 
 Vice is thy concubine ; and ye bad twain 
 Unshakeable supremacy maintain. 
 Helping each other on your hideous way, 
 Leading half London on to woe and bane — 
 Vice handing o'er to Crime its victims gay, 
 And Crime receiving those whom Vice has thrown away. 
 
 In London's dens, through London up and down, 
 Two hundred thousand criminals reside. 
 A city they of Crime, a goodly town, 
 Huge as Madrid, Spain's capital and pride, 
 Or lovely Lisbon on the Tagus' tide — ■ 
 Yet not a flush of leafage in its prime 
 With silvery fanes and towers diversified, 
 But one vast seething sink of Vice and Crime, 
 As turbid as the Thames, and filthy as its slime. 
 
 Come let us enter it. In far Japan, 
 So I have read, are Cities Five of Sin, 
 Where no one harbours, woman eke or man. 
 Except they have the right to enter in 
 By some foul wickedness or deadly sin. 
 Likewise in Caledonia the New, 
 Where Paris vomits all its vileness in. 
 No one resides but convicts, not a few, 
 Who fill the land with crime and curses through and 
 through. 
 
 Likwise afar where sad Saghalien rides, 
 Bathed in eternal fog and ceaseless rain. 
 None in that isle of felony resides 
 Save Russia's offal, doomed to lifelong pain, 
 The wearers of the fetter and the chain — 
 Jail-birds and gallows-birds, their crimes who rue. 
 Drenched by the vapours, beaten by the rain. 
 And such a bad abominable crew 
 Teem in Japan's five towns and Caledonia New. 
 
 But if the filth of foul Saghalien, 
 
 And of all else were gathered in one heap, 
 
68 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 'Twould not make up the mob of felon men 
 Who in great London town their orgies keep, 
 Who, late at night, when other people sleep 
 Delivered o'er to rest and sweet repose, 
 Prowl through the ways and in the shadows creep. 
 To rob and steal ; if need be, murder those 
 Who to such ills at night their precious selves expose. 
 
 Ill fare the wight, who after twelve has tolled 
 Prepares to thread St. Giles's slums alone ! 
 Ne'er will he pass in safety with his gold. 
 'Tis lucky if his life is left his own. 
 Nor only slums, but bye streets dark and lone 
 (Not a stone's throw from Oxford Street are some). 
 With hooligans and footpads are o'erflown. 
 Up to the lips of the great highways come. 
 In torrent full, the tide and scourings of the slum. 
 
 A lady fair, whose carriage is o'ersel. 
 Threads Endell Street, in evening toilette gowned. 
 But, ere she to the Opera can get. 
 Out spring a band and hustle her around. 
 Down is she struck all brutal to the ground. 
 And through her tender ears, the earrings torn, 
 Mangling the lovely lobes with hideous wound. 
 Her fingers, where her priceless rings are worn, 
 Are hacked and wrenched, that thence the jewels may 
 be borne. 
 
 What crimes are wrought, what robberies, what 
 
 theft. 
 When twenty thousand purses every week 
 Are filched in this great town by cunning deft I 
 Nay, there are "schools of crime," have I heard 
 
 speak. 
 Where picking pockets in a way unique, 
 Is taught on dolls suspended from a string. 
 Ye miscreants, who fear nor " copp " nor " beak," 
 Ye dare-devils prepared for anything 
 From robbery to murder foul — of ye I sing. 
 
 Down walks the unsuspecting gentleman, 
 Lightly at ease with watch and massive chain. 
 They, ambushed in the shade, have marked their 
 
 man, 
 And as he turns the corner spring amain 
 Like wolves upon him. Stunned with blows and 
 
 pain. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF CRIME. 69 
 
 They spoil him as would wolves a stately stag. 
 Six thousands watches thus each month are ta'en, 
 Jewellers shimmering windows smashed to rag; 
 And ruffians rude decamp exulting with the " swag." 
 
 Dire melting pot, the goal of all their toil, 
 Where watches, rings, chains, trinkets of pure ore, 
 In indistinguishable hodge-podge boil. 
 Say in what witches' kitchen thou dost roar. 
 With thieves around and cut-throats stooping o'er ? 
 What villain looks, as they behold their " nab," 
 Each greedy of his share, yet wishing more. 
 And half inclined the whole fell " swag " to grab, 
 And for the precious prize their dearest pal to stab ! 
 
 Hither was basest trophy carried once — 
 And France avenged Trafalgar's fatal day 
 By the degenerate vice of England's sons. 
 Here Nelson's cherished treasures found their way, 
 Which decked his mighty breast amid the fray. 
 Prized by a race of heroes passed away — 
 His star, his medals, which like lightning shone. 
 His trinkets. These did ruffians base convey. 
 And melt to dross, with England looking on — 
 The keepsakes dear of him who great Trafalgar won. 
 
 I chant ye, coiners, but I would not know you, 
 Who with your batteries of jars and phial. 
 Turn out amid the dens where ye bestow you 
 The crowns and florins of your mintage vile. 
 Ye prosper well in London ; in fine style 
 Ye live dispensing with an open hand 
 Thousands of pieces daily from your pile. 
 Ten thousand every day by your fell band 
 Are passed through London, and from London through 
 the land. 
 
 Coiners are foul, and fetid is their den. 
 But fouler than all filth and filthy dealing 
 Are vile extortioners who prey on men ; 
 Who in the dark, themselves in shade concealing, 
 Come forward, and their base design revealing 
 Threaten to charge abominable crime. 
 Peace, life, repute from their poor victim stealing. 
 O London, though thy pride be at its prime, 
 Revolting is thy offal, filthy is thy slime. 
 
70 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 What crimes there be committed in the docks ! 
 What bodies daily in the river found 
 Hurled to their doom by most unkindest shocks, 
 Whose story, if 'twere known, would all astound ! 
 Yet they have perished without sign or sound. 
 And gruesome fishers ply a gruesome trade 
 In fishing nightly Thames's depths profound, 
 Dragging with hooks, not fishes, but the dead, 
 Whose blood by murder foul in silence has been shed. 
 
 Thou dire irnposthume, thou pernicious beast. 
 Who hauntedst for a while Whitechapel's lairs. 
 And of thy fearful outrage never ceased. 
 Unstayed by inoffensive women's prayers. 
 Relentless — making midnight courts and squares 
 A very shambles of poor human flesh ; 
 Carving with cruel knife that never spares ; 
 With appetite for carnage ever fresh. 
 Hacking and mangling all who fell within thy mesh — 
 
 Thou frightedst for a while great London town. 
 Through all its breadth pulsating ran the fear. 
 Each woman in the west knew thy renown. 
 And trembled oft lest thou might be her dear. 
 Thy crime was great, conspicuous and clear ; 
 Yet hundreds like thee nightly pass their time 
 Like monsters, not like men, in rapine sheer. 
 With murder and with rape their hands begrime. 
 And fill great London full of undiscovered crime. 
 
 CANTO XI. 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF POVERTY. 
 
 A RHAPSODY ON POVERTY. 
 
 Pale Poverty, I recollect her, 
 With Misery her sister. 
 She was a direful spectre 
 Of shape sinister ; 
 A skeleton, an apparition. 
 Coming on unfriendly mission 
 To mortals poor in garrets and in dens, 
 
 Whose whereabouts too well she kens. 
 And her sister Misery 
 Is as fell to see, 
 And the same poor woe-begones she seeks. 
 Coming with her streaming eyes 
 
THE CIRCLE OF POVERTY. 71 
 
 And hollow cheeks 
 And storms of sighs, 
 And tears, 
 And fears. 
 And their cousin Squalor, is not far behind. 
 To the same poor prey she has a mind. 
 And she brings with her a gruesome train. 
 Filth, Dirt, Disease, Distress, and Pain. 
 And all 
 Are at the call 
 Of Poverty, dire skeleton, and follow 
 When she with hollow 
 Voice doth holloa. 
 She is the leader of the band 
 
 And at their head doth stand. 
 She is a spectre, 
 I recollect her, 
 And how she comes advancing 
 In a darkened room 
 Amid trouble and mid gloom, 
 
 The misery enhancing 
 By her presence felt, unseen. 
 And oft at nights in bed, 
 Resting your head. 
 You are suddenly aware 
 That the spectre pale is there. 
 Your very sense to scare 
 
 By its vicinity ; 
 And if at length you sleep, 
 A flood of horrors steep 
 Your tortured brain, 
 And doubt and pain 
 Come surging up in pitiless infinity. 
 
 And happy dreams are banished, 
 Their fairy scenes have vanished 
 And nightmares in their room 
 Intensify the gloom. 
 Then when you wake with timid feeling, 
 And through the blinds the yellow light is 
 stealing. 
 There comes a battle, a fearful fray. 
 Which opens drearily the day ; 
 A desperate battle 
 With the skeleton whose horrible bones rattle. 
 It advances 
 And it dances 
 With its rattling bones about you. 
 And its acrobatic actions 
 
72 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 And contractions 
 Foil and flout you. 
 Its cheeks, all pale with famine, 
 You shudder to examine. 
 Its jaws are gaunt and shivering. 
 Its every limb is quivering. 
 And it seizes and embraces you, 
 And closely interlaces you ; 
 And with hugging. 
 And with tugging, 
 And with grasping, 
 And with clasping. 
 It seeks to make you tire. 
 It seeks to throw you over in a wrestle long and 
 
 dire; 
 And you struggle and you wrestle till you faint 
 
 and would expire. 
 The fight is fought despairingly, with panting, sigh 
 and wail. 
 
 And the duel 
 Is most cruel 
 With Poverty the pale. 
 And your strength you must exert amain, 
 
 And every sinew you must strain. 
 So that the fiend may not obtain the mastery of you. 
 For if you trip and reel. 
 And come beneath its heel. 
 Alack ! unlucky fighter, you the fatal fall will rue ! 
 The man who once is thrown 
 Can never hold his own. 
 He is like a sinking vessel. 
 Sinking in a gale — 
 And in London city 
 (And the more the pity) 
 Few but have a wrestle 
 With Poverty the pale. 
 
 'Twas thus, as on my pilgrimage I passed 
 Through the great city, where I knew no rest, 
 I found myself amid a concourse vast 
 Of pale-faced people, wretched and depressed, 
 Who went about in attitudes distressed. 
 Wringing their hands for lack of more to do, 
 Or, sitting still, a mute despair expressed 
 Or let the drizzling tears their cheeks bedew. 
 Appalled, I found myself 'mid this unlovely crew. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF POVERTY. 
 
 Long had I looked, while tramping through the town, 
 After all shifts and efforts I had tried, 
 f or a convenient arch to lay me down, 
 When roof and shelter were at last denied. 
 There would I rest, I thought ; and fain had died, 
 Rather than such a resting-place acquire. 
 Yet still I looked, and on the left-hand side 
 The arch which under Holbom doth retire 
 Seemed to me most inviting, should I arch require. 
 
 Long did I it survey. 'Twas on a stair 
 Which trended up in spiral slow degrees, 
 With sinuous turning to the upper air, 
 And therefore would me shelter from the breeze, 
 And keep me warm should chilly midnight freeze. 
 So desperate my case became at last 
 I e en, to see if it would give me ease. 
 One day myself sheer on the pavement cast. 
 My only shelter from the storm and midnight blast. 
 
 Ann, who with me hast roamed the weary streets, 
 Hast faced the wind, hast braved the bitter cold, 
 Ann, whose low gentle voice my spirit greets. 
 Bidding me muster courage and be bold 
 The secrets of great London to unfold — 
 Twas thou, who when I fast began to tire. 
 Worn out with shame and hunger, want and cold, 
 When hopeless I was ready to expire — 
 Twas thou who with a needle picked me from the mire. 
 
 I had beheld — most pitiable sight ! 
 The dank Adelphi arches, where the poor, 
 Herding like bats beneath the noisome night. 
 Sleep huddled in their rags upon the floor. 
 I had surveyed the weary and the sore. 
 Who in Trafalgar Square, the nation's pride, 
 Sleep, heaped on benches, the vast pavement o'er. 
 Oft have I sat despairing at their side. 
 But fled abashed when they me curiously espied. 
 
 And in the parks the miserable crew, 
 Who congregate at even, I had scanned, 
 Who populate the seats and wander through 
 The shades from whence in daylight they are banned. 
 A homeless rout they are, a dangerous band. 
 And oft my safety reckless would I risk, 
 Pacing at midnight the Embankment's strand. 
 When the pale moon with full and glowing disc 
 Laps in a yellow flood the sleeping Obelisk. 
 
 73 
 
74 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Ten thousand people through the town's demesne 
 Sleep in the open air the whole year round, 
 Blown by the night-winds, wetted by the rain, 
 Oft couched upon the bare and soaking ground — 
 O misery and squalor most profound ! 
 Right happy he, by whom a bench is found 
 Whereon to slumber when his limbs do tire, 
 Or a fair arch with coping coated round, 
 Such as I did in my despair desire, 
 When thou didst with thy needle pluck me from the mire. 
 
 Thou savedst me from this abyss of woe — 
 Too low to sink ! — O God, that it should be ! 
 And m fair chamber thou didst me bestow. 
 Where thou didst comfort, cheer and pity me ; 
 Things strange to me amid my misery. 
 Thou gav'st me food, which I had need of sore. 
 Thou gav'st me roof and walls — sights rare to see — 
 Clothing, that I might wear my rags no more, 
 And to all woes and sorrows thou didst shut the door. 
 
 Well I remember me that little room — 
 That little room where thou didst sit and sew. 
 A Paradise it was amid my gloom, 
 A haven from the tempests and the snow. 
 No more the blustering winds could on me blow. 
 A roof was o'er me, though the roof was low. 
 Thy needle 'twas which rescued me from woe. 
 For while I into health and strength did grow. 
 Thou still would st ceaseless sit and sit and sew and sew. 
 
 None days so happy in my life again 
 As those sweet hours which there we spent together. 
 Vanished was suffering, past was every pain ; 
 My bark at length had lighted on calm weather. 
 Nay, do I put the doubtful question, whether 
 Such days of joy could e'er in life be found. 
 For sure 'tis happiness no bounds can tether. 
 When, some fell danger passed, we turn around. 
 And view the angry whirlpool safe on solid ground. 
 
 Oh, happy I such happiness to find. 
 Such haven to attain, such love to meet, 
 As with my saintly saviour, sweet and kind I 
 Ye houseless, homeless wanderers of the street. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF POVERTY. 75 
 
 Unhappy ye who know not such retreat 
 To save and shield ye from affliction's ban ! 
 But, ah ! in vain ye look. For well I weet, 
 Though many a woman loveth many a man, 
 Such love is not, nor could be, as the love of Ann. 
 
 I greet ye, wanderers of the murky night. 
 I greet ye, but I will not join your throng. 
 I will not know your pitiable plight, 
 I will not join ye as ye slouch along 
 Like beings of impurity and wrong. 
 Amid the midnight hideous and deform, 
 To whose arena fitly ye belong. 
 Ye may be houseless, homeless, but I warm. 
 Safe, shielded, housed, and sheltered from the pelting storm. 
 
 A LYRIC ON LONDON MUD. 
 
 Oh, the rain. 
 The black rain ! 
 That dances in the puddle, 
 And makes such muddy muddle, 
 With its splashing, 
 And its lashing. 
 And its flashing 
 In the lamplight or the moon. 
 For the road is all bestrewn 
 
 With puddles black 
 Across its track. 
 All twinkling, 
 And all sprinkling 
 Their dirty water round 
 With a pattering dull sound 
 Most depressing 
 And distressing. 
 As tired with your tramp. 
 And shivering with damp 
 You stand beneath a door 
 And watch the torrent pour. 
 And the offspring of the torrent 
 
 'Tis dirty, you may warrant. 
 And 'tis mud ! mud ! mud ! 
 Which in a flood, flood, flood. 
 Carpets London like a sheet. 
 Carpets road and square and street 
 
76 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 On a cold and rainy night. 
 And deplorable your plight, 
 
 And chilly is your blood, 
 As you flounder through the mud, 
 As you flounder and you stumble — 
 Matters nothing if you tumble. 
 For you're the riffraff and the scum, 
 
 The scourings of the slum, 
 To those beings superfine 
 Who in mansions most divine 
 Live in comfort, warmth and ease. 
 Under silken canopies. 
 
 While you outside 
 With weary stride 
 Which at every step doth tire. 
 
 Plough through the mire. 
 In archways standing or in doorways sheltering 
 From the torrent weltering. 
 
 With damp and chilly feet 
 Splashed with the muddy street. 
 Such is thy mud, O London, such thy slime 
 Which does thy town begrime. 
 To be out in thy rain 
 What pain ! 
 And thy fell mud 
 It chills the blood 
 And makes us hopeless and forlorn. 
 Better ne'er be born 
 
 Than have to face it. 
 Than night by night to pace it. 
 To have to tramp 
 In the mud and the damp — 
 Ne'er could I wish worse lot to any man. 
 Than live his life 'neath such a ban. 
 
 Wherefore far less unfortunate are ye, 
 Gifted v/ith thriftiness, who for few police 
 Obtain a refuge from your misery 
 In some dire " doss " or common lodging kens. 
 Where men, like sheep and cattle, herd in pens, 
 Where may be hired so many feet of floor. 
 And every room has population dense. 
 Where breathing sleepers spread the planking o'er. 
 Each to " the deputy" first having paid his score. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF POVERTY. 77 
 
 I have beheld — thank God ! have ne'er partaken 
 In this drear organised indentured woe. 
 Not so forlorn was I, not so forsaken. 
 Yet in my pilgrimages to and fro 
 In that dire town, where man can sink so low, 
 Scenes have I seen which would make angels weep- 
 Men, women, children, ragged, mean and low, 
 Crowded at night in stifling rooms like sheep, 
 In one promiscuous mass who huddle there and sleep. 
 
 Rooms without furniture, bleak, cold and bare, 
 Bedrooms with ne'er a bed where to repose. 
 Floors without floorcloth, and which only wear 
 A coat of dirt their foulness to expose ; 
 Windows without a pane, doors which ne'er close — 
 Such scenes, O Bethnal Green, thou knowest well, 
 Ye Seven Dials, of seven million woes. 
 And thou, Whitechapel, portico of hell. 
 Whose squalor and whose filth no mortal tongue can tell. 
 
 'Tis crushing poverty, 'tis grinding want. 
 Which has brought heavenly man to such a case. 
 Poverty, cruel tormentor, which wont 
 To stamp God's living image from the face, 
 And make a man a beast, debauched and base. 
 Ready for all things, servile, mean and low, 
 Dependent, cowardly, of timorous race. 
 They who have bled from poverty's dire blow 
 The depths to which a man may sink can only know. 
 
 AN ELEGY ON A PAWNBROKER'S. 
 
 Meanwhile where have the things all vanished 
 
 Which once filled the room 
 And gave comfort in the gloom, 
 But now £ure banished, 
 Leaving it bare ? 
 Where have they vanished, where ? 
 
78 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Seek them at the sink 
 Of all lost and stolen things, 
 
 The fountain dire whose brink 
 To the poor and felon brings 
 Food and drink. 
 Short surcease 
 And release 
 From the bitter grinding heel 
 Of the poverty they feel. 
 'Tis the pawnshop, low, alluring, 
 Whither come pouring 
 All day long 
 A ragged throng 
 With bundles and parcels under their arm. 
 Oft glancing round with furtive look 
 Ne'er to be mistook, 
 As if their errand were one of haim, 
 Not one of sheer necessity. 
 O Poverty, 
 Mother of shame, 
 What groundless blame 
 Proceeds from thee ! 
 One glance around, one halt. 
 As if about to do a fault. 
 
 And then — 
 They enter in, to find there others. 
 Their twin sisters and twin brothers. 
 
 All closeted alone. 
 As if unwilling to be known. 
 Like sheep they stand in their pen. 
 Haggard women and squalid men. 
 Offering wares on a dirty ledge. 
 Poor and paltry wares for pledge. 
 But what excitement, and how they show it ! 
 Oft on the price (did you but know it) 
 Depends a dinner for its supplying. 
 Or food for children starving and crying. 
 Or meat for a husband or mother dying. 
 And thus they strip themselves little by little 
 
THE CIRCLE OF POVERTY. .79 
 
 Of all they possess, 
 Of every tittle. 
 Of all their clothes in their wretchedness, 
 Till they stand there 
 Naked and bare, 
 And under the coat is only the skin. 
 And under the skirt are only the legs all shivering 
 and thin. 
 
 A man sits in a low and squalid room ; 
 The tattered plastered walls show many a tear ; 
 The hanging roof intensifies the gloom. 
 His face is one of fixed and fell despair. 
 Nought doth he know but never-ending care. 
 Nought can he find in London vast to do. 
 Albeit able-bodied, strong and fair. 
 Weeks has he passed in pacing London through. 
 And now his strength has gone ; and hope hath vanished 
 too. 
 
 For weary days he hath not tasted food. 
 His cheeks are hollow, sunken is his jaw. 
 Yet still hath life a relish ; and he could. 
 If food and offered nourishment he saw. 
 Seize meat voracious, and devour it raw. 
 But that time passes. Loathing takes its room. 
 He feeleth to an end his life doth draw. 
 Bent on a fixed inevitable doom, 
 Towards th' Embankment dire he presseth through the 
 gloom— 
 
 Rehearsing thus : " I cannot recommence 
 This aching life of misery untold. 
 Oh ! how I loathe with horror most intense 
 The cold and hunger, hunger and the cold ! 
 Fain would I that the waters me enfold, 
 Enveloping me with soft raiment o'er. 
 Fain would I pillow there. " One effort bold ! 
 One splash ! and in his ears the waters roar. 
 But God be blessed ! his woes and troubles are no more. 
 
80 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 I wandered on th' Embankment late at night. 
 Ne'er was a wretch abroad, myself except. 
 The night was rainy, straggling was the light 
 Which hom the lamps into the darkness crept. 
 It seemed to me as if great London slept. 
 On wandered I past Millbank and Vauxhall. 
 Through gloom and tempest heedlessly I stept. 
 Nought cared I, reckless, for my life at all, 
 Nor what from God or man that night might me befall. 
 
 Suddenly cleft the welkin overhead, 
 With one wild flash illumining the gloom. 
 Out burst the sputtering lightning, flaming red. 
 The thunder's loud reverberating boom 
 Pealed o'er the city like a knell of doom. 
 The winds awoke the river at my side, 
 And all its murky billows frothing spoom 
 Through bridge and bridge, and in a boiling tide 
 Sv/ept struggling in a sess through Vauxhall's arches 
 wide. 
 
 Along the roads and in the lanes behind 
 The tempest shrieks in revelry around. 
 The chimney-stacks which stagger in the wind. 
 Cast with a crash their rusty pots to ground. 
 The tiles, alive, clatter with rattling sound. 
 On forge the storm-clouds ; swishing pours the rain 
 On roofs in tens of thousands huddled round. 
 And grisly lightning, making all things plaan. 
 Lights up with fitful glare each squalid window pane. 
 
 So sped the tempest, so at last did cease. 
 London was still. Twas rain and wind no more. 
 The twinkling stars, pale messengers of peace, 
 Broke in a yellow flood the heavens o'er. 
 And beamed on London from their azure floor 
 As on one dear to tenants of the sky — 
 The earth's great daughter — greater none she bore- 
 The mart of nations, home of industry. 
 The mark, the cynosure of every human eye. 
 
THE CIRCLE OF PQVERTY. 81 
 
 So lay the stars and constellations through 
 The roofing vault which London doth enfold, 
 Sprinkling with twinkling tracery the blue, 
 Reflecting in the Thames their orbs of gold. 
 Which, laced with galaxies and splendour, rolled. 
 O'er Highgate lay the Bear ; in glittering home 
 O'er Stockwell did Orion station hold ; 
 The Pleiads gleamed on Kensington ; the dome 
 Of great St. Paul's bespangled Pegasus had clonib. 
 
 So shone the stars o'er London, as they shone 
 In early days from the same heavens down. 
 When London was a baby village on 
 The margin of the Thames, no mighty town, 
 A heap of mud-huts, primitive and brown, 
 Where hair-clad hunters, absent all the day, 
 Returned at eve beneath the darkness' frown, 
 Bringing to naked families the prey 
 Which on the flats of Thames they had the hap to slay. 
 
 So shone the stars and glittered in the Thames, 
 When on a mass of wooden domes they rose 
 And architectures reared on oaken 'stems, 
 Which did the rude barbarian's pride disclose. 
 When London first iato a town arose. 
 And by slow growth when centuries had sped 
 And London waxing to a city grows, 
 So did they fling their spangles ov^erhead. 
 And light and sparklmg starlight on its bosom shed. 
 
 So did they shine, when the great city grew 
 
 First huge, then mighty, gaining kings and queens, 
 
 Princes and governors, its borders through. 
 
 Then when it spread its arms to other scenes. 
 
 And into earth's far regions, strange terrenes, 
 
 Stretched forth its power sheer o'er the great globe's 
 
 girth. 
 Still shone the stars and showered their shining 
 
 sheens 
 O'er London, the metropolis of earth, 
 Which they had steepad each night in starlight from its 
 
 birth. 
 
 So will they shine when London is no more. 
 Twinkling with icy cold eternity 
 On heaps of ruins by Thames' silver shore, 
 And dreary deserts dire. So will they see 
 Sand cover London like a torrid sea, 
 
82 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Obliterating all topography. 
 Turning to hills its palaces and domes, 
 To sandy mounds its streeted symmetry, 
 To one bleak trackless waste the million homes. 
 Where now a beating life and busy bustle roams. 
 
 CANTO X. 
 
 THE SLEEP OF LONDON. 
 THE ETERNAL SLEEP OF LONDON, 
 
 OR 
 
 THE • BARD'S PROPHECY. J^ 
 
 LONDON IN THE YEAR 4000. 
 
 Alone on the Embankment with the stars, 
 Stillness around, and midnight hour the tide ; 
 Steeped in a peace which nothing earthly mars ! 
 Alone, yet not alone, for at my side 
 Was she, whose watchful wisdom did me guide. 
 Short while before, stretched on a common seat 
 Of Vauxhall Bridge, where broad it spans the tide, 
 I slept, she watching o'er with tendance sweet. 
 Now on the bank we stood, the river at our feet. 
 
 Before us in St. Stephen's glimmered light, 
 And dying light from many a window falls 
 In the broad vista offered to our sight 
 From silent Westminster to calm St. Paul's. 
 And as we looked, a spectacle enthralls 
 With sudden fascinating thrill our gaze ; 
 For lo ! the countless host of roofs and walls 
 A fanning wind seemed buoyantly to raise, 
 Revealing every scene within to our amaze. 
 
THE SLEEP OF LONDON, 83 
 
 THE REVEALING OF LONDON. 
 
 Roof after roof uplifted, 
 As if the roof were rifted. 
 And the open roof 
 
 Lifted aloof 
 Showed such scenes within 
 Of sorrow, joy, and sin. 
 Of happiness and misery. 
 Of wealth and doleful poverty, 
 All pressing together in crowded profusion, 
 As threw imagination in confusion 
 Not oiily at their multiplicity, but so 
 That the extremes of human bliss and human woe 
 Could co-exist all unespied 
 So close together side by side. 
 The first roof gave the sight 
 Of a ragged woman by candlelight 
 
 Plying her labour through the night, 
 'Mid squalor and dirt 
 Shaping a shirt, 
 Stitching gusset and seam 
 As in a weary dream ; 
 While tlirough the roof next door 'twas able 
 To see uproarious round a table 
 A noisy supper party laughing. 
 
 Fiery liquor quaffing. 
 With jests obscene and base profanity 
 Scoffing at virtue and humanity. 
 Beneath the next uplifted roof 
 
 Close at their side was proof, 
 To gainsay what the base were saying, 
 
 For here a man knelt praying, 
 Beseeching God, with streaming eyes, 
 
 To pardon his iniquities. 
 Blot out the past, condone his sin, 
 And let him from this day new life begin. 
 The next uplifted roof revealed a room 
 Half steeped in gloom. 
 And in the room a bed, 
 Like an altar spread, 
 A girl scarcely ten summers old, 
 
 A man leering and bold. 
 Both are together, with fastened door, 
 And he advances over the floor — 
 What is he doing, 
 This room within, 
 What course pursuing 
 
84 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Of sorrow and sin ? 
 Close, guilty roof, close, close thy eaves, 
 Too much the sight my spirit grieves. 
 But we were floating, 
 My guide and I, 
 Each prospect noting 
 From the airy sky 
 
 Through open roof. 
 As we floated aloof. 
 And we saw as we were going, 
 Thousands of weary women sewing, 
 Thousands of revellers at their ease. 
 Scores of figures on their knees. 
 Scores of ravishers at work. 
 In gloomy room who lurk. 
 Then said I, 
 As we clove the sky, 
 Sith I yearned for sights more cheerful, 
 
 Not these prospects tearful, 
 "From Vauxhall let us away 
 To other scenes I pray. 
 Over to Kensington, my angel, lead me, 
 
 Upon thy airy path precede me." j^ 
 
 So we floated, still flying, 
 Over lamplights fast dying. 
 First coming to Belgravia the great. 
 Where banquets were being protracted late, 
 Rich with the sheen of gold and wine 
 
 Of luxury divine. 
 Lordly mansions lay before us, 
 Which did lordly prospect show us. 
 And every mansion of them all 
 Enshrouded a banquet or a ball. 
 From some the swell of music floats. 
 And to its notes 
 Groups of graceful forms 
 SAvim around in swarms. 
 From others sweeps the sheen 
 Of a stiller scene — 
 Of tables heaped with luxuries 
 
 The sense to please. 
 Of glittering silver, glass, and flowers, 
 And the lustre that invests 
 The rich-robed guests 
 Who there beguile their hours. 
 From thence towards Kensington sweeping. 
 Over the town now slumbering and sleeping, 
 On Brompton next we lighted, 
 And found it not benighted, 
 But all alive. 
 
THE SLEEP OF LONDON. 85 
 
 A busy hive 
 Of bagnios and houses gay, 
 
 Where night was turned to day ; 
 Where vice in a giddy whirl 
 Of painted woman and gay girl 
 
 Was holding high revel, 
 Presided over by the Devil, 
 In many a room. 
 And beneath in the gloom, 
 Gaudy chambers in their legion lay exposed, 
 Where drinking and caressing, 
 Too trite a tale confessing, 
 Were to the eye disclosed. 
 Over Brompton we passed, 
 And reached Kensington at last, 
 With its piles palatial 
 And facades glacial. 
 But now so late was the night, 
 All was buried quite 
 In sleep 
 And slumber deep. 
 And the eye down peering. 
 Saw in lavish wealth appearing 
 Lofty rooms with silken trappings. 
 Furniture with costly wrappings. 
 Chairs of ivory and mirrors white 
 Looming ghostly in the night, 
 Piles of Oriental bric-brac, 
 What-nots heaped with dainty knick-knack. 
 Or else banquet tables left, 
 Of their glittering guests bereft ! 
 And what was late 
 A brave array of service and of plate. 
 
 And delicacies in profusion, 
 Lying in miscellaneous confusion. 
 
 And in sleeping-iooms silken and soft 
 Were proceeding oft 
 Dire adulteries that shocked the night, 
 Guilt which wealth conceals from sight. 
 And some uplifted roofs expose 
 
 Complete seraglios. 
 At this hour in full employment. 
 Where the young and lovely must 
 Make enjoyment 
 For mammon and for lust. 
 Thence from such scenes away 
 
86' THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Did we stray, 
 Over Hyde Park, 
 Now buried in the dark, 
 Whose trees, with many a plume, 
 Waved funereal in the gloom, 
 And so into darkened Oxford Street, 
 O'er which in progress fleet 
 We sped 
 Upon our airy way o'erhead. 
 All was asleep 
 In slumber deep, 
 Save where some gambling hell we saw 
 Opening its lurid jaw 
 To catch its victim, and entomb 
 Health, happiness and life within its womb. 
 So over miles and miles 
 Of streets and domiciles, 
 And house-tops in legion, 
 Crowding thickly every region, 
 O'er many a huge building 
 Which the moon was gilding. 
 And many a princely square 
 Lit up with moonbeams fair, ' 
 O'er many a dome and column 
 Of architecture solemn, 
 We sped we fled — 
 And when our journey ceased 
 I^^ad come to the inhospitable East, 
 
 Whose hovels were all seething 
 With sleepers stertorously breathing. 
 Oft twenty in a room 
 Lay plunged in rags and gloom. 
 Or in slumber sunk, 
 
 Maudlin and drunk, 
 Lay about doorways here and there 
 On the pavement cold and bare. 
 Over, for ever over sweeping 
 This motley world beneath us sleeping. 
 With its housetops black and dead 
 In millions 'neath us spread, 
 At last our voyage did cease 
 In midnight and in peace. 
 And looking round us, it was plain 
 We stood on Ihe Embankment once again. 
 
 With Vauxhall Bridge not far away. 
 Where erstwhile sleeping on a seat I lay. 
 And we to its right 
 Stood in the peaceful night. 
 
THE SLEEP OF LONDON. 87 
 
 Before us in St. Stephen's glimmered light, 
 And here and there light from a window falls 
 In the broad vista offered to our sight 
 From silent ^^'estminster to calm St. Paul's. 
 And it seemed all the while as if we had been dreaming, 
 For the stars were still beaming 
 In their galaxy of splendour 
 With a loving care and tender 
 
 Over London town, 
 On which their gentle eyes looked down. 
 And o'er Stepney lay the Lion, 
 And o'er Stockwell beamed Orion, 
 And o'er Highgate gleamed the Bear, 
 Couched in his northern lair. 
 And Charles's Wain 
 It glittered plain 
 Over St. Paul's huge dome, 
 Whither with all its jewels it had clomb. 
 
 Then taking up my parable I said : 
 'The day will come when London will be sand. 
 The streets and ways so busy will be dead. 
 A silent waste will be the bustling Strand, 
 With moss-grown ruins upon either hand. 
 Trafalgar's Square and pomp of victory 
 Will to eternal solitude be banned. 
 Its lordly column will in fragments lie 
 'Mid crumbling terraces unmarked by human eye, 
 
 St. Stephen's tower whence hourly rings the chime 
 Will fling for centuries its bells around, 
 Until will come th' inevitable time 
 When chimes will ring no more, nor any sound 
 Break from the turret green, with ivy crowned. 
 Save when the hooting owl 'neath evening's frown 
 Wakes from its roosting place and slumber sound. 
 And hoots afar across the ruined town. 
 Echoed through crumbling pile and pillar up and 
 down. 
 
 Hard by St. Stephen's on Thames' silver shore 
 Rises a grey and venerable fane, 
 Which ancient piety did oft restore. 
 The time will come when ages it hath lain, 
 And it will never be restored again. 
 The windows will be rifts; the roof will go ; 
 Down on the sacred nave will pelt the rain. 
 Through the lone aisles the whistling winds will 
 blow. 
 And on the altar's floor nettles and dockweeds grow. 
 
88 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Not far from hence a ruin huge doth he 
 'Mid wastes of weeds. 'Twas once the home of kings. 
 But now dismantled, naked 'neath the sky, 
 In its broad banquet-haUs the thistle springs, 
 And ivy to its sculptured columns clings. 
 Its breached and fallen walls let in the light 
 To halls where princes held their gatherings. 
 Nor dreamed that Buckingham's brave palace bright 
 Would e'er be plunged in ruin and eternal night. 
 
 What stones are those which lie in motley heap. 
 And spacions acres with their ruins pave ? 
 Here doth another perished palace sleep, 
 And yet another, brilliant, bright and brave, 
 As any by the Thames' translucent v/ave. 
 Here a great King by subjects' malice fell. 
 And from the scaffold sank to shameful grave. 
 But who he was, on earth none knoweth well, 
 Nor can the crumbling stones themselves the story tell. 
 
 That winding avenue of stones and weeds. 
 Nettles and briars which doth the chaos meet, 
 And northward nigh a lonely mile proceeds — • 
 That once was fashionable Regent Street. 
 And near the river, where the eye doth greet 
 A shapeless mass of bricks, blocks, fragments dumb, 
 Still as the grave, with nettles draped conplete. 
 That once was Charing Cross, where crowds did 
 come. 
 With all its huge hotels, streets, stations, throngs and hum. 
 
 Then comes the Strand — but now the Strand no more. 
 Nought but the waterfowl and lonely coot 
 Maintain a life along the lapping shore. 
 Bitterns across the weedy quagmires hoot. 
 Which but for them would be for ever mute. 
 And one another answering, as they wade, 
 Make music most dolorous, where the flute 
 And harp and heavenly violin once played. 
 And drama, music, art, their home and empire made. 
 
 Fleet Street is rubbish, hidden quite with weed, 
 And crossed with many a slow and oozing rill 
 Which doth to stagnant torpid Thames proceed. 
 From silent Fleet Street rises Ludgate Hill, 
 Tangled and lonely, melancholy, still, 
 And at the end a spectacle most dire — 
 St. Paul's in ruins! (hear it, he that will !) 
 Its dome collapsed, and fallen down its spire. 
 With not one buttress whole and not one wall entire. 
 
THE SLEEP OF LONDON. 89 
 
 No monuments remain of carvfed stone 
 To mark the couches of the mighty dead. 
 Long since are they effaced and overgrown 
 'Neath the o'erwhehning debris overhead. 
 A huge arena in the midst outspread 
 Of dark green flags and rotting monJdering Avails 
 Bespeak the place whose sanctity hath fled, 
 Where pealed the pompons service of St. Paul's, 
 From crowds of white-robed priests and canons in their 
 stalls. 
 
 So have I seen in Melrose's grey pile. 
 When pallid moonlight hath outspread its sheen 
 O'er crumbling oriel and ruined aisle. 
 The phantom ghosts arise of what hath been, 
 And populate again the silent scene — 
 Again the organ peal its solemn swell, 
 Again the monks, their cloistered stalls between. 
 Chant the sweet litanies they knew so well, 
 W^hich kept the mind from sin, the soul from pains of 
 hell:— 
 
 So o'er this mighty minster of the dead 
 The moon will rise each evening in the sky, 
 And its pale moonbeams o'er the ruin shed, 
 As if it would not suffer willingly 
 So great and stately edifice to die. 
 But gild it every eve with virgin gold 
 Poured down in rich profusion from on high, 
 Until no longer stone on stone doth hold, 
 And the last relic is to grisly ruin rolled. 
 
 Through roads of dreary ruin let us rove. 
 Through bleak Cheapside, a wilderness, a moor. 
 Where London's trade and busiest traffic throve, 
 But now as silent as a waveless shore ; 
 Until we come to ruins three, of yore 
 The heart and centre of all city life — 
 The treasure house where lay the precious ore. 
 The hall with festivals and banquets rife. 
 The mart where mightiest business waxed and fevered 
 strife. 
 
 Who would surmise the great and golden Bank 
 Under this heap of dust and rubbish spread. 
 Where only lichens live and mosses rank ? 
 Yet here vv^hat stores of wealth were closeted, 
 What yellow bullion piled, what ingots red, 
 What riches fabulous to estimate, 
 
90 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 Which could have raised the city from the dead 
 
 With one swift magic touch ! — but now too late, 
 
 When gold and wealth and people, all have bowed to fate. 
 
 Hard by, an arch all solitary stands^ 
 Was this the erst Imperial Exchange, 
 Where wealth in millions daily once changed hands ? 
 Yet now the fragment of an ivied grange — 
 No more ! — where bats and chattering owlets range. 
 E'en as we look, out flies a covey loud. 
 And perches on a neighbour ruin strange. 
 Which tangled moss and creepers do enshroud, 
 But once in London's pride was the Mayor's Mansion 
 proud. 
 
 So hath the city fallen. And how fell 
 The mighty city ? How did doom arrive ? 
 How doth it fall from highest heaven to hell ? 
 How shall it fall ? Since still it is alive. 
 Still its heart beats, and still the busy hive 
 Of populace its causeways up and down 
 Pace evermore, while trades and business thrive. 
 What shall begin the ruin of this town. 
 The mother of great nations, and the world's renown ? 
 
 An enemy shall come, and shake its power, 
 In the full heyday of its wealth and pride, 
 Coming in dire and unexpected hour 
 From the chill Baltic's frore and frozen tide. 
 Where Neva belches with its billows wide ; 
 Or from the sandy European plain 
 With small fertility diversified. 
 
 Where stern Berlin, where leaders proud still reign, 
 Sends from the dusty earth its navies to the main. 
 
 An enemy shall come against it. Yea ! 
 And shake that. power which now exults secure. 
 Yet such the might of London, it will stay 
 The shock, and still a mighty while endure, 
 As if eternal summertide were sure, 
 Its streets still humming as the traffic plies. 
 Its marts replete with goods the world to lure, 
 Its shops with wares, its quays with merchandise, 
 Its homes, its palaces, with lordly luxuries. 
 
 Yet rotten is the fabric of the state ; 
 
 Effeminate and enervate the race. 
 
 No longer powerful, and no longer great. 
 
THE SLEEP OF LONDON. 91 
 
 And London, to its scandal and disgrace, 
 The proudest city on the whole world's face, 
 \\\\\ puichase peace by ignominious bribe 
 From stir and contiict which it would not face 
 From valiant nation or from warlike tribe. 
 Its gold they will accept with mocking jeer and jibe. 
 
 Meanwhile voluptuousness will increase. 
 The lazy Londoners with pleasures cloyed 
 Will fondly long for everlasting peace ; 
 Sith in the world's so much to be enjoyed, 
 Never to be with war or woe annoyed, 
 But still to batten in a paradise, 
 Li gain or pleasure evermore employed. 
 And the whole town will swim with luxuries. 
 The homes with wanton riot and debaucheries. 
 
 Then in the streets will grass begin to grow. 
 
 And where the stones are polished now and bare 
 
 By crowds of vehicles that o'er them go. 
 
 The verdant blade will peep, first here and there, 
 
 Then thicker, till at last with mantle fair 
 
 It drapes the clattering stones and makes them 
 
 dumb. 
 Quieter now each noisy thoroughfare. 
 Hushed the dire din, and more subdued the hum 
 Which does from rattling wheels and cart and carriage 
 come. 
 
 Oh, what a sight 'twill be to see Cheapside 
 With half its broad arena clad with grass ! 
 No longer down it rolls a seething tide. 
 But half the road, which doth all needs surpass. 
 Is broad enough to let the traffic pass. 
 And that dense street, where now colliding drays 
 And vans and waggons struggle in a mass — 
 Thames Street — will then be witnessed with amaze 
 Basking at ease, with not one van to meet the gaze. 
 
 And by the river's edge, where now the tide 
 
 Past docks and wharves and quays and piers doth 
 
 swim. 
 Will grow the bulrush and the sedge, and hide 
 The rotting stones whose green and crumbling rim 
 Speaks mighty solitude at Thames' brim. 
 The weed w'ill wave on whar\es, where now^ the bales 
 Of priceless stuffs which Eastern looms do limn, 
 Wafted to busy London with full sails. 
 Lie heaped in piles of richness, which the eye regales. 
 
92 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 No argosies will plough the silent Thames, 
 No ships of tonnage up to Limehouse ply, 
 Nor any boat of worth .the current stems, 
 Since ne'er is need of vessel to supply 
 Exotics to a city doomed to die. 
 Whose dwellers in such wares small interest take. 
 The Thames itself seems failing to the eye, 
 And mantled with green scum its way doth make 
 Stagnating, looking less a river than a lake. 
 
 The bridges one by one in ruirs fall. 
 With arches gone by gradual decay ; 
 Since for the people there is little call 
 From side to side of Thames to make their way 
 (They go not far, this folk, from home away.) 
 Wherefore small need there is to make repair. 
 Of bridges, which few passers would convey. 
 And so they are left idly standing there, 
 To crumble stone by stone withouten thought or care. 
 
 And now among the houses of the town 
 Decay is evident on every hand. 
 Often unroofed and breached, and falling down 
 At gable ends, untenanted they stand. 
 The dwellers in this place to ruin banned 
 Live life with casual indifference. 
 If their own homes the gale will not withstand. 
 They migrate thence to neighbouring tenements, 
 Deserted, but more proof against the elements. 
 
 Then as the town, so will the climate change. 
 Instead of fogs will come an arid sky. 
 Sand will replace the mud with carpet strange. 
 And, little moisture falling from on high, 
 Each year it will increase perpetuallj^ 
 As when round mighty Babylon of old 
 The meads and fields of rich fertility 
 Were dried to dust, the dust to sands of gold. 
 Which round the city vast in drifts and wreaths were 
 rolled. 
 
 So around London in the times to come 
 Where now is life will be aridity, 
 Where is a velvet green Elysium 
 Will be a parching desert, waste and dry. 
 The Thames itself will fail its pure supply 
 Of fresh and gushing water to the land. 
 'Twill make its oozing way laboriously 
 
THE SLEEP OF LONDON. 93 
 
 Between the dusty heaps on every hand, 
 A shallow, languid stream oft sinking in the sand. 
 
 Few will the dwellers in the town be then, 
 And every year still fewer than the last — 
 A race of curious w^omen and strange men, 
 Idle, unkempt, with tatters round them cast, 
 Ignorant, knowing little of the past, 
 Or what great place they are inhabiting, 
 Since in the area of this city vast 
 They soothly tenant but a narrow ring, 
 Which each new rising year yet narrower doth bring. 
 
 Around them loom great ruins, columns tall. 
 Huge edifices roofless and decayed — 
 Yet know they not the meaning of it all, 
 Nor in what mighty town their lot is laid. 
 Fain would they shelter in a hut new-made 
 Rather than under domes imperial 
 Rent W'ith decrepitude, with ruin frayed. 
 Admitting all the gusts that rise and fall, 
 The dripping rain at nights, when darkness spreads its 
 pall. 
 
 As when around sequestered Temesvar, 
 Where Theiss and rolling Danube blend their flood, 
 And everlasting plains extend afar 
 Of moory wilderness and marshy mud ; 
 Outside, Avhere scattered huts the country stud, 
 Troops of unhealthy peasants doth one meet. 
 Deformed of frame, and of impoverished blood, 
 W^ho scarce can stand upon their shaking feet, 
 And chattering with ague do the traveller greet : 
 
 Such folk shall live in London in those days, 
 Descendants fallen and degenerate 
 Of a once great and earth-embracing race. 
 But little better than the beasts their state, 
 The beasts which yearly denser congregate 
 To share the ruins with enfeebled men. 
 Jackals at every corner prowling wait. 
 And snarling snap up garbage now^ and then, 
 \Mhle huger beasts than they next make the town their 
 den. 
 
 Wolves o'er the sandy desert, once Hyde Park, 
 Scamper and prowl in ever-growing pack, 
 W'ith bowlings hideous amid the dark, 
 W'hen night is rainy and the heaven black. 
 
94 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 And in the daytime o'er the arid track, 
 Once Oxford Street, the foul hyena crawls 
 Sniffing for offal or for bones to crack ; 
 The leopard's tread on Holborn softly falls ; 
 While roaring lions whelp and stable in St. Paul's. 
 
 Few the inhabitants of such a place. 
 Which, what with sandy drifts and dust storms fell, 
 Each year doth more affectingly deface. 
 So that e'en those who knew its ruins well 
 Scarce the new whereabouts of things could tell. 
 Here is a ridge with sandy scrub bespread — 
 Its name in bygone days the Strand did spell. 
 This brackish brook, which sinks in sandy bed. 
 And may be stepped across, once was the Thames, 'tis 
 said. 
 
 That mound globose, amorphous, huge and high, 
 A very pyramid of shapeless sand, 
 Was Paul's cathedral in the days gone by — 
 A fane by careful architecture planned. 
 But buried now, and to oblivion banned. 
 Mound after mound and hill on hill arise ; 
 Like landmarks in the desert waste they stand. 
 And he who peered beneath with curious eyes 
 Would find the wrecks of once well-known localities. 
 
 The solitary nomads who remain, 
 And by the clogged and buried ruins roam. 
 Making amid that silent sandy plain 
 The gaunt and fragmentary blocks their home, 
 O'er which the sand-drifts dense not yet have clomb. 
 Fewer and fewer wax, nor e'er can thrive 
 Amid that parching waste and arid loam ; 
 Till the inevitable hour arrive. 
 When but one mortal man in London is alive. 
 
 He, blown by sandstorms and oppressed by fears. 
 Famished with want, with solitude distressed, 
 The wreck of an eternity of years, 
 Of all who once that solitude possessed — 
 Paces the drear and arid waste, whose breast 
 With crumbling piles and pillars is o'erstrown ; 
 Carving each day to give him interest 
 A record of his life upon a stone 
 In language Avhich will soon be evermore unknown. 
 
 The night before when his drear rounds he made 
 From ruin unto ruin, and watch kept. 
 
THE SLEEP OF LONDON. 95 
 
 He saw a lion, who before him strayed, 
 And softly up a broken terrace stept, 
 Which in the starlight and the moonlight slept, 
 And when he lay beneath his arch in bed, 
 He heard the soft paws of the beasts, who crept 
 On the stone roofing of his grot o'erhead. 
 All this, cut deep and clear, upon the stone he said. 
 
 He carves his doings of the past few days, 
 His name, the name of those by fortune same 
 Who lived and died, his neighbours, in the place. 
 He carves what he believes was once the name 
 Of that strange buried spot, when known to fame. 
 And then no more — not that he wanteth cause. 
 But sooth because the torrid heat which came 
 From the hot sand around did bid him pause, 
 And cease awhile the strange inscriptions which he draws. 
 
 Such heat awoke, such darkness filled the sky. 
 As if some suffocating parched Simoom 
 Were rising, to descend in storm on high. 
 And swallow up within its seething womb 
 The region round, all Nature to entomb. 
 Sultrier waxed the loaded air, and made 
 The heat tremendous ; deeper grew the gloom. 
 Tlien burst the thunder's angry cannonade. 
 The livid lightning flashed, and glittered through the 
 shade. 
 
 The winds awoke in orgy turbulent, 
 And blew the desert to a turbid sea 
 Of raging sands that lashed the firmament. 
 Pillars of sandstorm hurry o'er the lee. 
 Which shrieking winds pursue incessantly. 
 At length abates the fearful hurricane. 
 Leaving but two unsightly hills to see — 
 Two hills of sand upon a sandy plain. 
 And this is all which doth of London now remain." 
 
 Thus rapt did I my parable repeat, 
 And having uttered it at length did cease. 
 We twain still stood, the river at our feet ; 
 And all around was bathed in sleep and peace. 
 The moonlight failed not, rather did increase. 
 And in a shower of sheeny splendour falls 
 On the still scene of starlight and of peace. 
 From silent Westminster to calm St. Paul's. 
 The spectacle of beauty soul and sense enthralls. 
 
96 THE EPIC QF LONDON, 
 
 THE CURSING OF LONDON. 
 
 Then did I look on London for awhile 
 Sleeping and living, not without a smile ; 
 A sigh for its fate, 
 But a smile for its folly. 
 
 For I had plentiful cause for hate, 
 Cause for melancholy. 
 And I sighed when I thought that the mighty town 
 
 Would one day go in ruin down. 
 
 Itself was as shortlived as I, 
 A thing of a day which once must die, 
 And I sighed my sigh. 
 But immediately after 
 
 Came copious Homeric laughter, 
 To think what a fool, 
 An ineffable fool. 
 
 Was this city by Thames' pool, 
 For rejecting me and my noble lays 
 Worthy of Athens in its best days. 
 For having in the midst of it a Homer, 
 And scorning him for any idle comer 
 
 And his great epic the world's wonder. 
 
 Full of heaven and heaven's thunder, 
 For this base drab of a city to spurn, 
 Giving him laughter and jeers in return 
 For his noble aims and his lordly rhyme, 
 Which kings would have worshipped once on a time, 
 But this base town of tradesmen and Jews 
 
 Has no option but to refuse. 
 
 Me it has scorned and sent to Hades, 
 And lavished its smiles on weak men and ladies — - 
 
 Poor, pitiful, worthless wittols, 
 Whose writings are not worth workmen's victuals, 
 Yet laurels are lavished on their poor brains, 
 And gold in a shower upon them rains. 
 And I thought, as I mused, that the heaps of sand. 
 
 The great city to ruin banned, 
 
 Were no bad ending to such folly. 
 
 And the prospect of London town 
 
 Gone in heaps of ruin down. 
 
 Did not make me melancholy. 
 
 Then I cried : "Be London accursed 
 
 For all it has done to me, and first 
 
 For making a wreck of my life and health. 
 
 My virtue, my prospects, and my wealth, 
 
THE CURSING OF LONDON. 97 
 
 Be it accursed 
 With curses the worst 
 That venom can frame, 
 Or tongue can name ! 
 With curses the worst 
 Be London accursed I 
 Be it accursed for that young sweet wife 
 W^hich it ravished from my hfe, 
 My Isabella, my angel celestial, 
 W^ho but for a space in this life terrestrial 
 To me was given 
 To show the way to heaven, 
 
 Ere she did fly 
 To the starry sky. 
 But 'twas London's decree 
 That did take her from me. 
 "Twas London that plunged me in poverty dire. 
 I could help her not. 
 Could not ease her lot, 
 And only watch her in grief expire ; 
 When one kind act of that town could save 
 Her young sweet life from an early grave. 
 May London be cursed 
 With curses the worst ! 
 May owls make their nest 
 In the spots it loves best ! 
 May jackals and wolves o'er its acres prowl, 
 And in its fanes may hyenas howl! 
 Be it accursed 
 With curses the Avorst, 
 For rejecting me 
 And comtemning me, 
 For neglecting me, 
 And condemning me 
 To a life of grinding toil and care, 
 To poverty, squalor and despair, 
 So that I almost lost my life 
 And went to follow my sweet young wife, 
 In my unutterable misery 
 And my great wrestle with poverty. 
 May London be cursed 
 With curses the worst ! 
 And my great poem of toil and tears, 
 The patient work of a score of years, 
 
 Of years of darkness and despair. 
 Of desperate battle and frantic prayer, 
 "The Human Epic," the great world's wonder, 
 An epic of heaven and heaven's thunder, 
 
98 THE EPIC OF LONDON. 
 
 When I brought it an offering to London's shrine, 
 
 London scorned it, because 'twas mine. 
 But an 'twere by one of its own dull fry, 
 It would have lauded it to the sky. 
 But being by me, 
 'Twas trumpery, 
 Fit only for jeer and mockery. 
 London gave me no crowns and roses ; 
 No chaplet round my brow reposes. 
 But for my reward I was covered with shame, 
 Loaded with obloquy, contempt and blame. 
 Ah, curse thee, London, for how thou hast used me. 
 For having despised me and foully abused me ! 
 The day will come when thou shalt be sand, 
 A wilderness shall be thy Strand. 
 And while thou liest. 
 Damned town, and diest 
 In ruins and dust. 
 As die thou must, 
 The Human Epic," the theme of thy scorn, 
 Will enter on a radiant morn, 
 'Twill live among nations yet unborn, 
 In nobler regions of the earth 
 The noble lay will have new birth. 
 In other lands, in other clime, 
 'Twill sing and be sung for ageless time. 
 Ah, curse thee, London, with double curses ! 
 Would I could kill thee with my verses ! 
 Yet mine's the triumph — I'll forgive thee. 
 "The Human Epic" will outlive thee. 
 'Twill outlive thee, O London town. 
 And England's proud imperial crown. 
 
 'Thus did I speak, and cursed the sleeping city. 
 But my good angel at my side did seek 
 To soothe me with kind comfort and with pity. 
 And when she spoke, to my surprise did speak 
 Words not of wrath but resignation meek. 
 Though she had suffered from the town as I, 
 Yet she blessed London, and did only seek 
 Causes for blessing, with sweet casuistry 
 Turning its evil into good continually. 
 
 And still I railed that all was bad Nvithin it ; 
 And still I witnessed how my heart had bled. 
 But there she stood for many an earnest minute, 
 
THE CURSING OF LONDON. 99 
 
 While twinkling shone the starry vault o'erhead, 
 Her angel face with moonlight o'er it shed, 
 Admonishing that all should be forgiven. 
 And pointing to. the glimmering stars, she said, 
 O mortal brother, sore with sorrow riven, 
 There runs a road from London leading straight to 
 Heaven." 
 
ROWBOTHAM THE MODERN HOMER 
 
 Is the Rev. J. F. ROWBOTHAM, B.A., M.A. Oxon, D.D., 
 
 Vicar of Sutton Cheney, Leicestershire, 
 
 Scholar of BalHol Colleg-e, Oxford, Taylorian Scholar in Italian of 
 
 the University of Oxford, Jameson Prizeman. 
 
 THE HUMAN EPIC 
 
 THE TWELFTH EPIC POEM OF THE WORLD, 
 
 BY 
 
 ROWBOTHAM THE MODERN HOMER. 
 
 Homer's Iliad. Homer's Odyssey. Virgil's .4ineid. Virgil's Georgics. 
 
 Lucretius' Universe. Dante's Divine Comedy. Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. 
 Camoens' Lusiad. Spenser's Faerie Oueene. Milton's Paradise Lost. 
 
 Byron's Childe Hiaold. Rowbotham's Human Epic. 
 
 THE HUMAN EPIC tells a marvellous story — How the earth 
 was once i: sun ; how the earth was once a sea ; how it became a 
 forest, and then a habitable earth; how monsters and prodigies 
 arose to people it ; and how among- these strange inhabitants came 
 man; how man, at first a very outcast, and the scorn of all creatures 
 living-, g-radually made good his footing in the world; conquered 
 every obstacle, triumphed over every foe, purified and ennobled 
 himself, till at last he became the king of nature and lord of all 
 
 created things. 
 
 SCENES IN THE HUMAN EPIC. 
 
 Among the numerous scenes of fre«th originality and unexampled 
 
 interest (because they have no parallel in any literature of any age 
 
 or country) may be cited the following : — 
 
 THE LIFE OF THE EARTH WHEN THE EARTH WAS A SUN. 
 
 THE LIFE OF THE EARTH WHEN THE EARTH WAS A SEA. 
 
 THE DEPTHS OF THE PRIMEVAL OCEAN. 
 
 WHEN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL WAS A FOREST. 
 
 THE EARTHLY PARADISE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 
 
 THE FIRST FAMILY. THE DELUGE. THE CAVE MEN. 
 
 THE MONSTERS OF THE EARTH. 
 
THE BATTLES OF THE CAVE MEN AND THE MONSTERS. 
 
 THE BRIDGE OF DREAD ACROSS THE ATLANTIC. 
 
 THE VANISHED CONTINENT IN THE ATLANTIC: 
 
 ITS BEAUTY, ITS PEOPLE, ITS HISTORY. 
 
 THE LAKE DV^ELLERS. THE ICE AGE. 
 
 THE V\^ORLD FROZEN TO SOLID ICE. 
 
 THE SUFFERINGS AND STRUGGLES OF MANKIND. 
 
 THE UNIVERSAL SPRING, and CONCLUSION OF THE EPIC. 
 
 THE HUMAN EPIC 
 
 Contains the Origins of all things which affect or interest 
 mankind. It tells of 
 
 The Origin of the Universe. The Invgition of Tools. 
 
 The Origin of Life. The Discovery of Agriculture. 
 
 The Origin of Man. The Invention of Cookery. 
 
 The Origin of Language. The Invention of Boatbuilding. 
 
 The Origin of Society. The Invention of Pottery, Carving, 
 
 The Origin of the Family. Tattooing, and other Arts. 
 
 The Origin of Modesty. The Origin of Dancing, Singing, 
 
 The Origin of Virtue. Poetry. 
 
 The Inventions and Discoveries of the The Origin of Music. 
 
 Human Race. The Origin of Civilisation. 
 
 The Invention of Weapons. The Origin of Art. 
 
 The Discovery of Fire. The Origin of Religion. 
 
 It contains the Most Ancient Legends of the Human Race. 
 
 THE EPIC OF GOD AND THE DEVIL, 
 
 By ROWBOTHAM THE MODERN HOMER, 
 
 Depicts the eternal opposition of Good and Evil throughout 
 universal nature. The poem rapidly passes into a narrative; and 
 Satan's Assault on the Seventy Thousand Heavens is one of the 
 most marvellous pieces of epic poetry ever chanted or ever conceived. 
 In the later Cantos the true nature of God as seen in His works 
 is beautifully portrayed, and suggests countless new thoughts and 
 conceptions, which have within them the nucleus of a new religion. 
 
 THE EPIC OF LONDON, 
 
 By ROWBOTHAM THE MODERN HOMER, 
 
 Depicts the London of to-day. The life of the great City is 
 portrayed in a series of Circles. We have The Circle of Fashion, 
 The Circle of Business, The Circle of Labour, The Circle of 
 Pleasure, The Circle of Vice, The Circle of Crime, The Circle of 
 Poverty. Through all of these the poet in imagination passes, or 
 rather descends, till he comes to the lowest and last, which is like 
 the infernal pit of Dante's Divine Comedy. 
 
THE EPIC of the SWISS LAKE DWELLERS. 
 
 By ROWBOTHAM THE MODERN HOMER. 
 
 This is the most musical of Dr. Rowbotham's hig-hly musical 
 epic poems. It is a romance of the Stone Age, and tells the story 
 how a Lake City was beset by savage foes, and how a heroine, 
 when they attacked her town, led them to perdition amid the waters 
 and saved her city, " but to endless pity " sank in the whirlpools 
 with those she guided thither. 
 
 THE EPIC OF THE EMPIRE. 
 
 Britain's National Epic Poem, 
 By ROWBOTHAM THE MODERN HOMER, 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 Drake and the Buccaneers. The Spanish Armada. The Pilgrim 
 
 Fathers. The Conquest of Canada. The Conquest of India. 
 
 The Discoveries of Australia, New Zealand. The Battle of 
 
 Trafalgar. The Battle of Waterloo. 
 
 (Written in epic poetry to be the National Epic Poem of Britain 
 and the British Race.) 
 
 THE EPIC OF CHARLEMAGNE. 
 
 By ROWBOTHAM THE MODERN HOMER. 
 
 This is the earliest of Dr. Rowbotham's published Epics. 
 But he has told us himself that when he was a boy of eleven he 
 was engaged upon two epic poems, " Abraham " and " The Siege 
 of Paris." The Epic of Charlemagne sings the daring deeds of 
 the Twelve Paladins of Charlemagne. It is highly chivalrous and 
 romantic ; teeming with graphic similes and gorgeous imagination. 
 
 These Epics, some about the length, some half the length of 
 Virgil's ^neid (price 2s. 6d. each, post free), may be obtained 
 from the Poet, 
 
 Thr Rev. J. F. ROWBOTHAM, M.A. Oxon, D.D., 
 
 The Vicarage, Sutton Cheney, Nuneaton*. 
 
' Tms BOOK TQ nrr^ ^^^^^^^^ 
 
 STAMPED SeS^^ST date 
 
 Ai^ INITIAL P^nr.„ 
 
 ^'LL BE ASSESSED i ^^ ^5 CE^TS 
 
 ^^2l-ioo«.7,.40(6936,^ 
 
607186 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY