CHARING CROSS 
 TO SAINT PAUL'S 
 
 JcisriN M9 CARrnr 
 AND Joseph Tennell 

 
 o 
 
 \/ 
 
 M^
 
 CHARING CROSS TO ST. PAUL'S
 
 
 CHANCEKV LANE
 
 CHARING CROSS 
 
 TO ST. PAUL'S 
 
 NOTES BY 
 
 JUSTIN McCarthy, ma\ 
 
 AND VIGNETTES BY 
 JOSEPH PENNELL 
 
 London 
 SEELEY AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 Essex Street, Strand 
 
 1S93
 
 UMVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Introduction 
 
 I 
 
 II. Charing Cross 
 
 20 
 
 III. The Strand .... 
 
 . 63 
 
 I\'. The Strand {continued) 
 
 104 
 
 V. The Law Courts 
 
 • 147 
 
 VI. Fleet Street 
 
 . IS4 
 
 VII. LUDGATE IIlLI, 
 
 • 213 
 
 VIII. St. Paul's .... 
 
 . 238
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Chancery Lane 
 
 Flower Girls at Charing Cross 
 
 Trafalgar Square 
 
 Charing Cross 
 
 King Charles's Statue . 
 
 Morley's Hotel, Trafalgar Square 
 
 St. Martin's in the Fields 
 
 Busses 
 
 Fish Shop at Charing Cross 
 
 In the Strand 
 
 The Strand 
 
 Exeter Hall 
 
 Terry's Theatre 
 
 The Gaiety 
 
 Wellington Street 
 
 The Lyceum 
 
 Burleigh Street, Strand 
 
 Fivnlispiece 
 
 23 
 29 
 
 33 
 37 
 41 
 45 
 53 
 59 
 67 
 71 
 77 
 81 
 86 
 89 
 93 
 99
 
 X 
 
 L ist of Illusti'ations 
 
 The Strand, v,\ Somp:rset IIousk 
 
 Somerset House . 
 
 St. Marv-le-Straxd 
 
 St. Mary-le-Strand from the East 
 
 Old Houses in Holvweit. Street 
 
 St. Clement Danes 
 
 The Corner of Essex Street 
 
 The Law Courts . 
 
 Entrance to the Courts 
 
 The Clock Tower of the Law Courts 
 
 Fleet Street 
 
 St. Dunstan's in the West 
 
 The Windows of "Punch" 
 
 St. Bride's Passage 
 
 "Sporting Life" Office 
 
 "Daily News" Office . 
 
 The Railway Bridge, Ludgate Hill 
 
 Ludgate Circus 
 
 Wild's Hotel 
 
 St. Martin's, Ludgate . 
 
 St. Paul's Churchyard . 
 
 West Door of St. Paul's 
 
 PAGE 
 II I 
 
 129 
 
 161 
 
 189 
 192 
 
 203 
 214 
 217 
 223 
 231 
 243 
 255
 
 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 We cannot — at least I cannot, to put it more 
 modestly — reconstruct in mind the London 
 of the far, very far past, I have set myself 
 the task often, and laboriously tried to ac- 
 complish it, but it will not shape itself, that 
 far-away Roman London : it will not shape 
 itself to my eyes or my mind. I cannot see 
 the London with the cinctures of the great 
 wall and the seven gates and the double 
 doors to each gate. The historical sugges- 
 tion conveys to my mind no manner of 
 idea. I cannot get back to a Roman London 
 — a fortress London ; I can hardly believe in 
 it. But lest any one should take my words 
 too literally, and should assume me to be 
 
 B
 
 Chariiio- Cross to St. PauT s 
 
 guilty of an absurd scepticism which ought to 
 be instantly confuted by the citation of over- 
 whelming evidence from history, I hasten to 
 explain that I am not really sceptical in that 
 sense. I have not the smallest doubt about 
 the existence of the Roman London ; I only 
 mean to say that I cannot believe in it In the 
 sense of realising it and understanding what 
 it would be to live in it. I have a friend 
 who only cares about romances and novels 
 which tell of the time with which he is 
 familiar ; he will not condescend to read even 
 the finest story of the chivalric age. " I don't 
 believe in a man in armour," he says. Now 
 niy friend is, apart from this curious self- 
 accepted limitation to his reading, a well-read 
 man ; he is perfectly well aware that in olden 
 days knights went to battle encased in steel ; 
 I have no doubt he could, if need were, 
 favour any company with a dissertation on 
 the various kinds of armour In which men of 
 different chivalric orders and ages bedizened 
 and defended themselves. But his imagina- 
 tion does not realise the mail-clad hero as
 
 Introduction 
 
 a liviiiP: creature, as a man and a brother 
 with a soul to be saved, and a heart to be 
 perplexed and betossed, and in that sense he 
 does not believe in the man in armour. In 
 that sense, and that sense only, I fail to 
 put faith in Roman London. It lives for 
 history ; it does not live for me. 
 
 I have somewhat of a similar notion with 
 regard to Rome — a notion which I fancy I 
 share with most people, even with some 
 scholarly persons, if they would only ac- 
 knowledge it. I cannot reconstruct in my 
 own mind the Rome of the Republican days. 
 In vain I read and study and survey the 
 pfround itself; no Rome rises for me but the 
 Imperial Rome — the Rome of the Caesars — 
 the Rome of the Empire, or at all events, the 
 Rome of those days which were blossoming 
 or decaying into empire — the Rome of the 
 first and greatest Imperator. I am inclined 
 to think that it is so with most persons, 
 and that the Rome which they can see in 
 the mind's eye is the Rome which Horace 
 and Juvenal and Martial and Persius have
 
 Charing Cross to St. PauTs 
 
 described for us. London Is real for me 
 only so far back as when she rises before me 
 mediaeval ; I can see her, recognise her, 
 study her, appreciate her, and even live in 
 her as the London of Chaucer ; beyond that 
 day she is not London for me, but might be 
 confounded with Troy or Persepolis or the 
 capital of Cloud-cuckoo-land. 
 
 Of that mediaeval London the most living, 
 the most vital, the most real part, is that 
 stretch of thoroughfare which connects 
 Charing Cross with St. Paul's. In this 
 volume the artist with the pencil — who plays 
 a much more important part than the would- 
 be artist with the pen — has taken from 
 Charing Cross to St. Paul's for his province. 
 This was, this is, the backbone of London. 
 Mediaeval London grew up around it. The 
 Strand was the baldric which belted Court 
 and Parliament together ; the town grew up 
 alone and about the Strand as a coral island 
 grows in the sea. Something of that growth 
 and its gradual realisation is brought home 
 to one's mind rather oddly during any session
 
 hitroduction 
 
 of the House of Commons. It happens hi 
 this way : A stranger standing in the inner 
 lobby of the House of Commons at the 
 moment when the House adjourns for the 
 night is surprised to see an official rush 
 into the midst of the dispersing crowd and to 
 hear him shout, in tone loud as that of some 
 Homeric hero, the mystic question, "Who 
 goes home ? " There is no answer — the 
 man with the Homeric voice does not seem 
 to expect any. The stranger naturally asks 
 for an explanation. The explanation is 
 found in the fact that once upon a time 
 London and Westminster were separate and 
 widely-separated cities — a sort of desert of 
 barbarism lay between. But a desert is not 
 necessarily a place absolutely unpeopled. 
 The Eastern desert has its Bedouins ; the 
 desert between Westminster and London 
 had its footpads and its mounted highway- 
 men. People made up parties to ride home 
 together, themselves and their servants, for 
 common safety. So the official of the 
 Houses of Parliament had it as one of his
 
 Charino- Cross to St. PauFs 
 
 regular duties to shout out in the lobbies and 
 the corridors the invitation which called on 
 home -going people to close their ranks, to 
 form this or that group, and to ride together 
 across the perils of Lincoln's Inn Fields, or 
 close by the skirts of Alsatia. Now, when 
 the times are all changed, when not one 
 member of Parliament out of a baker's dozen 
 goes Cityward on his way home, when the 
 highwayman has disappeared even out of 
 our literature — unless where perchance he 
 still lingers and lurks in the yellowing paper 
 and the blurred print of some mean little 
 publication for boys — still the nightly cry 
 of "Who goes home?" is heard re-echoing 
 across the lobby and through the corridors, 
 and even along the terrace of the House of 
 Commons, 
 
 Long may it sound ! May its echo never 
 grow less ! May no rage of modern innova- 
 tion, realism, or utility abolish that function 
 and silence that call! It keeps alive in our 
 minds — in the minds of those who have 
 minds — some idea of the gradual growth of
 
 Introduction 
 
 London ; we think of the nightly wayfarers 
 riding or driving eastward, and we are there- 
 by reminded of the growth of the Strand, 
 and the part that growth played in the crea- 
 tion of what we know as London. Do not 
 let us assume too hastily that all since that 
 time has been mere and sheer progress. 
 We do not now make up parties to go home 
 together for common safety, but might it 
 not be well if we still sometimes did so ? 
 The highwaymen are gone, to be sure, but 
 the robbers now occasionally — indeed, not in- 
 frequently — take to the use of the revolver, 
 and I have heard travelled men say that 
 there are few places which have ever really 
 scared them of nights like the Thames Em- 
 bankment. However, I am not now en- 
 gaged in a study of social progress, or a 
 comparison of the virtues and the vices, of 
 the dangers and the protections of this time 
 and any other. My concern is to point to 
 the fact that London grew up along and 
 around the Strand, so that he who fares with 
 Mr, Pennell, and if I may say so, with me.
 
 8 Charing Cross to St. PauF s 
 
 from Charing Cross to St. Paul's, will have 
 trodden the main highroad of England's 
 national and imperial history. 
 
 Palaces grew up along the Strand — we 
 must remember that it was then a strand, 
 and that the few houses built on its south 
 side looked on the Thames — palaces began 
 to grow up, for the great nobles naturally 
 liked to have houses not quite too far either 
 from Westminster or from the City. The 
 younger nobles, and some of the elders just 
 as well, no doubt, were fond of going down 
 into the City ; the nobles borrowed money 
 there from the acknowledged money-lenders, 
 and from the jewellers and the silversmiths. 
 The City wives had the repute of being 
 pretty and coquettish ever since the days of 
 Chaucer, and, perhaps, indeed, since long 
 before: the young "swells" loved to go 
 down to the City ; the citizens' wives were 
 not ashamed then to sell their wares openly 
 in their shops ; they sold embroidered shirts 
 for the gallants, and gorgeous laced under- 
 garments for the ladies ; and one may fancy
 
 Introduction 
 
 from the dramatic literature of the time that 
 many a middle-aged gentleman professed to 
 have gone down to the shops of the City 
 merely in search of pretty gifts of lace and 
 embroidery to bring home to his wife and his 
 daughters. In the later Elizabethan days 
 and throughout the time of King James the 
 City became a favourite haunt of gallants 
 who loved to smoke tobacco. They did not 
 call it "smoking tobacco" then — they called 
 it "drinking tobacco"; they inhaled the 
 tobacco into their throats, and they, not 
 unnaturally, called that drinking it. Then, 
 when there were any great difficulties in the 
 wars of the sovereign, when troops had to 
 be levied and money raised, when foreign 
 war seemed to become inevitable, or domes- 
 tic rebellion was whispered of in the North 
 or in the West, then the City became a place 
 of signal importance, and the ministers of the 
 King were none too proud to go there and 
 stand, metaphorically, plumed cap in hand, 
 and beseech of the City magnates to rally 
 with their money-bags around the Throne.
 
 I o Charing Cross to St. Paufs 
 
 The City was almost always devoted and 
 loyal — always, indeed, unless and until the 
 kings entirely overdid the business of sover- 
 eign kingship, as some of them certainly did, 
 and then the City got together its trainbands 
 and manfully stood by the country. But, in 
 the meantime — for we have been anticipat- 
 ing a good deal — the City was becoming 
 gradually of more and more importance to 
 the King and the Court and the nobles, and 
 so the stately palaces began to arise along 
 the Strand. Many an ancient water-gate, 
 looking curiously out of date to-day amid the 
 upsetting and demolishing and reconstruct- 
 ing newnesses of the Thames Embankment, 
 tells of that ancient time when the Strand 
 was open to the river, even as the iron 
 mooring- rings on some of the street walls 
 of Ravenna remind one of the days when 
 Ravenna was another Venice, and forewarn 
 us of the days when Venice is to be another 
 Ravenna. 
 
 The narrow belt of the occupied Strand 
 began to broaden and to thicken ; the palaces
 
 Introduction 1 1 
 
 increased on either side, shutting out the river 
 and the fields ; then the houses began to jostle 
 each other ; the poor little Roman bath, stone- 
 cold in its niche, got gradually blocked up and 
 hidden away, and had grown to be almost as 
 much of a curiosity five centuries ago as it is 
 in our own day ; the river was beginning to 
 be more and more occupied by wharfs and 
 warehouses ; the Westminster quarter was 
 sending its offshoots down along the line of 
 streets ; the City was sending its offshoots up 
 along the line of river ; the Strand was turning 
 from the Strand properly so called into the 
 Strand improperly so called — as we have 
 known it all our lives, and our grandfathers and 
 grandmothers before us. Between certain 
 palaces of nobles and shops of burghers there 
 ran green and pleasant lanes down to the 
 Thames — then, and for long after, a silver 
 stream, and in the season hawthorn still 
 blossomed in the lanes and honeysuckle made 
 them fraerant. This was on the south side of 
 the Strand. On the north side there were 
 glimpses of the fields and the country —
 
 12 Cliaring Cross to St. Paiifs 
 
 glimpses growing more and more tantalising 
 as time went on, and as the movement of 
 civilisation trod down the old beauties and 
 delights of the Strand. The Strand, how- 
 ever, had magnificent compensation for its 
 losses. It was like some rustic maiden who 
 has been married by a prince : the rustic 
 maiden wears no necklace of beads or chaplet 
 of wild flowers any more, but she has a 
 coronet on her head and a string of diamonds 
 round her neck ; she does not dance on the 
 village green and under the maypole any 
 longer, but she moves in the stately figures of 
 the Court minuet. Which is the better part ? 
 That would have to be left to the village 
 maiden to tell for herself, if haply she could 
 tell it, which she probably could not. The 
 Strand ceased to be the green shore of the 
 Thames, and became the highway of kings 
 and of history. Along that Strand either 
 way moved the stately procession of Eng- 
 land's imperial life ; captive princes, captive 
 kings, have passed along there ; every 
 English sovereign — I believe I may say
 
 Inh'odiiction 1 3 
 
 every one : is there a single exception ? — 
 has passed in triumph along that favoured 
 thoroughfare ; the funeral processions of 
 queens have gone one way, the funeral pro- 
 cessions of heroes and conquerors have gone 
 sometimes the one way and sometimes the 
 other ; even down to our own prosaic days 
 the Strand has been allowed to keep up its 
 character as an imperial highway. I can re- 
 member the funeral of the Duke of Welling- 
 ton, that "most high and mighty prince," as he 
 might well have been called — Marlborough 
 was so called in the official records of his 
 funeral pageantry. Men and women of only 
 middle age can remember the wedding pro- 
 cession of the Prince and Princess of Wales, 
 and the thanksgiving ceremonial when the 
 fever-stricken Prince was given back to life. 
 All this kind of moving splendour the 
 Strand has seen ; for this it has had to 
 sacrifice its early countrified ways, its hedges, 
 its flowers, and the river waves that melted 
 on its banks. 
 
 Of late years, perhaps, it is a little falling
 
 14 CJiaring Cross to St. Paiirs 
 
 away in its august adornments. The pro- 
 cessions of princes are becoming infrequent ; 
 we have no captive kings any more ; and 
 when a foreign sovereign comes here of his 
 own goodwill and pleasure he does not 
 always care to fare in public array along the 
 Strand. No set of devoted Stuartists now 
 make their way along the Strand, and, sud- 
 denly breaking out with appropriate emblems 
 and devices on Ludgate Hill, vociferously 
 proclaim the reign of James the Third. Even 
 the Lord Mayor's Show begins to have less 
 of a grip than it had upon the mind and the 
 memory of the Strand — it only holds a sort 
 of year-to-year lease of existence. It was, to 
 be sure, revived and refurbished last year or 
 the year before last, let us say, but who can 
 tell whether the spirit of modernity — I have 
 seen the word somewhere lately — or of econ- 
 omy, or we know not what, may not suspend 
 its appearance for a year or two, and after 
 that interval, supposing it to come, what may 
 not happen ? Has the Strand outlived its 
 grand characteristic ? " No longer steel-clad
 
 Introduction 1 5 
 
 warriors ride along thy " — something or other 
 — "shore." No, indeed, none such, except 
 only the men in armour of the Lord Mayor's 
 Show, and, alas ! who believes in them ? The 
 more real, flesh-like, living they are, the more 
 they are incredible and impossible ; the more 
 significantly do they proclaim that the Strand 
 has no longer anything to do with the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 Well, perhaps the Strand is not altogether 
 the worse for that — perhaps it is not wholly 
 and merely a sufferer and a victim to the 
 wrongdoing of time because it has lost 
 the mail-clad warriors and even the proces- 
 sions of kings. I can well remember reading 
 in one of the earlier volumes of State Trials 
 the story of some murder committed at the 
 setting on of this or that great disguised — I 
 mean concealed — personage, some personage 
 carefully kept in the background. The murder 
 was not found out for many days, and why, 
 does my reader think } Because the murdered 
 body was hidden away " among the dunghills 
 on the Strand at the end of Drury Lane."
 
 1 6 Charing Cross to St. Paulas 
 
 Among the dunghills on the Strand a 
 murdered corpse lying for days undiscovered ! 
 Are we not on the whole somewhat better 
 off now? If we miss — supposing we ever 
 do miss — the mail-clad warriors and the 
 triumphant or captive kings, have we not the 
 better of it, seeing that we are free of the 
 murdered bodies stowed away amid the dung- 
 hills ? Then the Mohocks — those awful 
 gangs of " swell " rowdies who amused them- 
 selves by rolling women in casks down 
 Ludgate Hill at midnight ; and "tipping the 
 lion," that is, flattening the nose, for peaceful 
 and honest citizens returning home belated ; 
 and "pinking," and "sweating," and "tumb- 
 ling," and all the rest of it — is it not some- 
 thing that we are free of these young " bloods" 
 and their brutal practical jokes, and their 
 torturing and witless buffoonery ? I may say, 
 perhaps, in order to be fair while I am deal- 
 ing with this part of the history of London, 
 that I believe there has been the most un- 
 reasonable exa^oreration about the stories of 
 the London Mohocks, just as there has been.
 
 Int7'oduction 1 7 
 
 perhaps, about the perils of the Thames Em- 
 bankment in our own times. The Mohocks 
 friehtened Swift, He writes, in one of his 
 letters to Stella, that people in London were 
 afraid to stir out late at night because of them. 
 The Spectator talks a good deal about 
 them, and Gay, of course, has not left them 
 unnoticed. Still, I cannot help believing, 
 even from- the very evidence of the period, 
 that a few mad isolated pranks were ex- 
 aggerated into a system of outrage, and that 
 a brutal practical joke upon some wandering 
 Paphian of Drury Lane was made to terrify 
 respectable matrons and maids who were 
 anxious to attend balls and parties late o' 
 nights. If I am quite mistaken in this im- 
 pression I should be only too glad that any 
 one well acquainted with the London records 
 and statistics of the time, such as they were, 
 should point me to the trustworthy evidence 
 which shows that the Mohocks were a really 
 prolonged, and a systematic trouble to the 
 London nioht-life of the time of Swift and 
 
 Addison.
 
 1 8 Charino- Cross to St. Paurs 
 
 Even if, however, I should be right in my 
 contention, that will not touch the point I 
 strive to make when I insist that, on the 
 whole, we who traverse the Strand have not 
 lost utterly when we lost the mail-clad men 
 and the processions of kings. Supposing, as 
 I do suppose, that the doings and the dangers 
 of the Mohocks were grossly exaggerated, 
 what then ? The panic was a distinct trouble ; 
 the scare was a very practical nuisance. We 
 should not be much frightened just now if 
 we heard of Mohock gangs east of Charing 
 Cross of nights. We should go to the 
 Lyceum Theatre, and the Gaiety, and the 
 Adelphi, and Drury Lane, and Covent 
 Garden, and all the other theatres, just the 
 same ; we should leave the police to look 
 after us — and they would look after us — and 
 the Mohocks, if they should present them- 
 selves, would be simply " run in," and would 
 get ever so many days' imprisonment when 
 brought up at Bow Street next morning. 
 Does mediaevalism mean picturesqueness, and 
 modernity comfort ? I do not venture to
 
 Introduction 1 9 
 
 answer. And supposing it be so, which 
 London — mediDeval or modern — ■ has the 
 better part? "Alas!" as Hamlet says, "I 
 know not."
 
 II 
 
 CHARING CROSS 
 
 The Londoner as a rule never sees London. 
 He never looks at it. He knows it all too 
 well. He has grown used to it. He has 
 given up looking at it and thinking about 
 it. He may be very fond of it all the 
 same. A man may be very fond of his 
 daughter, but if on coming home alone some 
 night he happens to see a light shining 
 from the windows of her bedroom he does 
 not stop beneath and contemplate the 
 gleaming panes with eyes of reverential 
 poetic love, as he used to contemplate the 
 light in her mother's window long ago, 
 before he was married. So with the 
 Londoner and London. He may love the
 
 Charing Cross 2 1 
 
 place, or, at all events, his own nook of it ; 
 he may be happy with his friends and his 
 cronies and his favourite haunts, and his 
 dinners and clubs and theatres and Parlia- 
 ment, and all the rest of it ; but he goes 
 along Pall Mall or the Strand and he sees 
 nothing. The born Londoner is worst of 
 all in that way. The resident Londoner 
 who came to town from the provinces or 
 from Ireland or Scotland remembers a time 
 when he could not study London half enough 
 for his own satisfaction, when every street 
 had its own especial interest for him, and he 
 looked at the houses as if he were inquiring 
 into the riddle and the story of each of them. 
 But he too subsides before long into the 
 condition of the born Londoner, and he goes 
 his daily way apathetic, and the Strand is a 
 thoroughfare for him and Charing Cross is a 
 crowded place where he has to dodge the 
 omnibuses, and Strand and Charing Cross 
 are nothing more to him. The monotony 
 of his daily movement has made him blind 
 to London, as the monotony of the snow
 
 2 2 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 
 
 makes men blind while they are mounting 
 the Alpine steeps. 
 
 Happily there comes now and again a 
 stranger with fresh, artistic eyes— an observer 
 and a man of genius who re-creates London 
 for us Londoners, and shows us what it 
 really is — what it was to our own eyes while 
 they could yet see it for themselves. Take, 
 for example — a very remarkable example 
 indeed — the drawings reproduced in this 
 book, which are by the hand of a stranger. 
 Mr. Pennell illustrates the street life of 
 London from Charinof Cross to St. Paul's. 
 He reminds one of the familiar magician of 
 the East who holds in his hand a little drop 
 of ink, and somebody gazing steadily in sees 
 there the realities of some scene and some 
 life long unknown to him. Mr. Pennell 
 takes his little drop of ink, and he dips his 
 pen in it ; and behold, in a moment we are 
 all gazing into the street life of London. 
 We are more than gazing into it ; we are 
 living in it — we are of it. These sketches 
 were all evidently taken on the spot. How
 
 
 
 
 
 '■' ^'^^-. l1 
 
 FLOWER GIKLS AT CHARING CROSS
 
 Charing Cross 25 
 
 else should they be taken ? — I can imagine 
 some reader asking. Well, what I mean is 
 that they were not taken by a man looking 
 out of a window — say a man looking- out of 
 a window in Morley's Hotel, and sketch- 
 ing composedly the crowds far below him. 
 Nor were they taken by a man seated com- 
 fortably in a carriage or a hansom cab 
 stationary at the bottom of a street. Any 
 one who will take the trouble to observe 
 the sketches in the whole effect of each 
 of them will see at once what I mean. 
 These pictures come from the very middle 
 of the crowd. A friend of mine made 
 some capital Piccadilly sketches from a place 
 of elevation on the roof of a cab ; but the 
 sketches had all the appearance of that quiet 
 contemplation, that study from the upper 
 boxes, which such a position would naturally 
 give. The painter was drawing something 
 which, if I may put it so, had nothing 
 to. do with him. He was drawing the 
 street life of Piccadilly as he might sit on 
 one of the terraces at Berne and sketch
 
 2 6 Charing Cross to St. PauTs 
 
 the outlines of the Oberland mountain- 
 range. 
 
 But look at these Charing Cross sketches. 
 Why, you feel as if you could see the artist 
 running and plunging through the crowd. 
 I think I can see him taking his stand com- 
 posedly in one of the " refuges," and there 
 steadily working away at his sketch until 
 he has finished it, every figure and every 
 house, and then plunging in among the 
 omnibuses and cabs and crowd again, and 
 shouldering his way until he gets another 
 favourable place and makes another sketch. 
 How he must have loved to do it all ! How 
 he must have revelled in it ! How he has 
 got the very atmosphere of each scene, the 
 very life of each house! "The very houses 
 seem asleep," says Wordsworth ; and he 
 was quite right, because he was looking at 
 a scene of London in the early dawn. But 
 in these sketches — sketches of the midday, 
 most of them — the houses are all broad 
 awake. Every group in the street, every 
 single figure even, has a business and a
 
 Charing Cross 27 
 
 story of its own. What would one not give 
 for such a series of pictures of the Hfe of 
 that London which Dickens knew and made 
 so real ? That London is disappearing fast. 
 There will soon have to be an edition of 
 Dickens with copious explanatory notes on 
 every page, or the younger readers will not 
 know half the time what the author is 
 talking about. Why, at this day a man or 
 woman of twenty-one thinks of the Thames 
 at Westminster as always bordered by a 
 stately and somewhat monotonous embank- 
 ment. What does he or she know about 
 the rickety wharfs, the oozy old piers, the 
 huge dark piles of warehouses, the tumble- 
 down little old public-houses that once varie- 
 gated the banks of the silent highway there ? 
 Even the elders forget all too soon how 
 things were a few years ago. Only the 
 other day I learned with much surprise — 
 at first with a little or, indeed, not a little, 
 incredulity — that the beadle of the Bur- 
 lington Arcade is gone, that there has not 
 been this long time back any beadle at the
 
 28 Charing Cross to St. Paid's 
 
 Burlington Arcade. Can this be so, or was 
 saucy youth merely playing pranks with me ? 
 Is he indeed gone, that stately, gorgeous 
 creature who used to fill my young days 
 with awe ? Why, he was always there when 
 I was a young man, and I pass through the 
 Burlington Arcade a good deal still, but I 
 never doubted that my old friend the beadle 
 was always there. To say I never missed 
 him would not explain the condition of 
 things ; of course, if I had missed him I 
 should have found out all about him. I 
 assumed him ; I took him for (granted ; he 
 was there for me, with a waistcoat which 
 defied the hand of time and a cocked hat 
 to which the gods had given immortal 
 youth. And he is gone — has long been 
 gone, they say. Who shall explain to the 
 younger generation all about Northumberland 
 House and the lion that used to surmount 
 it — the lion that a credulous crowd was one 
 day persuaded to believe it saw wagging 
 its tail } Already Temple Bar is beginning 
 to be forgotten ; it will be disbelieved in by
 
 TRAFALGAR SQUARE
 
 Charing Cross 31 
 
 the day after to-morrow or thereabouts. 
 Soon a time will come when Londoners 
 will take it for granted, if they think about 
 the matter at all, that Addison may have 
 sauntered along Shaftesbury Avenue, and 
 that Sir Roger de Coverley may have put 
 up at the Inns of Court Hotel. 
 
 That was a dio-ression. I come back to 
 Charing Cross and these sketches of streets 
 and street life. They give a surprising 
 impression of crowd and movement ; a 
 nervous, retiring person almost shudders as 
 he looks on them ; " I should not like to 
 be hustling in that crowd," he thinks, "and 
 dodging those cabs and omnibuses." In 
 that masterpiece of farce-comedy — I do not 
 know what else to call it — Ben Jonson's 
 " Bartholomew Fair," the reader seems to 
 feel the very dust of the fair getting into 
 his eyes and his throat and making him 
 thirsty. So in these sketches the confusion 
 of the crowd makes a nervous man feel 
 uncomfortable. He seems to be afraid to 
 stand and quietly study them ; he feels as
 
 32 Charing Cross to St. PaiiTs 
 
 if he could only get darting glimpses at 
 them, as the artist himself must often have 
 done. Some strange old picturesque front 
 of a house strikes him much. Is there a 
 house like that, he asks himself, a house 
 like that so close to Charing Cross, where 
 I thought everything was commonplace, 
 and most things were new.'* He goes and 
 tests the truth of the sketch by finding out 
 the house. Yes, to be sure, there it is ; 
 there is the quaint, picturesque old-world 
 front with the carvings over its windows. 
 It is there, and I pass the place every 
 day, and I never saw it before. Some 
 day one of us will cross Trafalgar Square, 
 and, suddenly looking up in a moment of 
 awakened consciousness, will become pos- 
 sessed of the fact that the old National 
 Gallery with its pepper-boxes is gone, and 
 that some structure altogether different in 
 style stands in its place. He will ask some 
 benevolent passer-by about the matter, and 
 will be told that the old building was taken 
 down years ago.
 
 1*^ ■ — ^ ■( 
 
 
 
 CHARING CROSS 
 
 D
 
 Charing Cross 35 
 
 To a dreamy sort of personage like that 
 — dreamy as a habit, but still interested 
 in most things — these sketches of London 
 ought to have an infinite charm. They 
 give him the street life exactly as it is, 
 but yet as he could not see it for himself; 
 they give him the crowd without the dis- 
 comfort of being actually in the crowd. If 
 his dreams have a way of taking the form 
 of stories and character studies, there are 
 figures and groups enough here to feed 
 him with material. Look at that young 
 man who is standing to have his shoes 
 blacked within sight of Eleanor's Cross. 
 He is a well-made, well-set-up young man. 
 He bends forward with eyes studiously 
 turned downward. We cannot see his 
 eyes, his back is turned to us ; but we can 
 know quite well from the bend of his head 
 that he is looking carefully down. What is 
 he contemplating ? — the process of blacking 
 his boots which is being carried on by the 
 spry little lad, whose whole character can 
 be read in the shape of his head and in so
 
 36 Charing Cross to St. PaiLVs 
 
 much of his nose as can be seen under the 
 peak of his cap, his head being bowed over 
 his work ? No, I don't think the young 
 man is wholly absorbed in the shoe-cleaning 
 process ; but I think his dress shows that 
 he is from the country, and I don't fancy 
 he likes being boot-blacked in the full sight 
 of all Charing Cross, and so he looks down 
 to hide his modesty. He is at the time of 
 life when young men, especially from the 
 country, really fancy that London is look- 
 ing at them. I take this to be a very 
 ingenuous, true-hearted young man. He 
 is something in the engineering line, I 
 fancy, I have a notion that he is staying 
 at the Golden Cross hard by, and that he 
 has just come out from the portals of that 
 hotel, which must always have a tender 
 interest for those who love David Copper- 
 field. But I do not suppose that our young 
 eno-ineer went to the Golden Cross for the 
 sake of David Copperfield — he is too young 
 to care much about Dickens ; but if he has 
 not a sweetheart in London then I know
 
 c-.. ••*, ccr 
 
 ■^•^■^■S^" 
 
 KING CHARLES S STATUE
 
 Chai'ing Cross 39 
 
 nothing of the world of fiction. Why, he 
 is thinking at this very moment what an 
 awful thino- it would be if she were to 
 drive by just then, and see him standing 
 there with his trousers tucked up and 
 having his boots blacked. But why did 
 he have his boots blacked in the street ? 
 Why did he not have them looked to at 
 the Golden Cross ? He did — why, of course 
 he did. But do you not see that the day 
 is very muddy ? Do you not observe the 
 highly -tucked -up trousers of the careful 
 man with the eyeglass who is picking his 
 steps across the street ? Our youth came 
 out from the Golden Cross spick and span 
 as regards his boots, but as he was hurrying 
 along the street an omnibus bore down upon 
 him and drove him into a puddle, and it 
 would take too much time to go back to 
 the hotel, and he just came on the boot- 
 cleaning boy, and he is in haste to go and 
 meet his sweetheart, who will be walking 
 by accident in a Covent Garden flower 
 arcade, and he certainly would not go to
 
 40 Charino- Cross to St. Paitf s 
 
 meet her in dirty boots ; and so you see how 
 it all occurs. He will go to the Lyceum to- 
 night ; he cannot see his sweetheart in the 
 evening. Her people do not consider him 
 quite up to her social level ; but I am per- 
 suaded that he will get on, and will make a 
 position for himself, and win the girl yet. 
 You can see all this in his strono- shoulders 
 and his general air of self-reliance. 
 
 "Ah, bear in mind that garden was enchanted !" 
 
 These words are from Edgar Poe's charm- 
 ing verses, " To Helen." They explain how 
 and why the poet came to understand all the 
 phases of Helen's character, all the feelings 
 of her heart, her "silently serene sea of 
 pride," how boundless her ambition, yet 
 " how fathomless her capacity for love." He 
 only got a glimpse of her upturned face 
 "and of her eyes upturned, alas! in sorrow" 
 — one midnight in a garden, years ago. 
 How did he come to learn all about her and 
 to understand her in that moment's glance.'^ 
 He explains it thus — " Bear in mind that
 
 
 ^ .^'^ 
 
 ■!-.*/ 
 
 
 
 
 
 w 
 
 H 
 O 
 
 
 o
 
 Charing Cross 43 
 
 garden was enchanted ! " vSo I say of the 
 streets of London — in this particuhu- instance, 
 of Charing Cross. Bear in mind that the 
 scene is enchanted. I shall qo on this 
 assumption all the time I am reading London 
 street life through these sketches. That is 
 how one comes to learn so easily the whole 
 story of our young engineer, and even to 
 know that he is an eno-jneer. Can w^e not 
 tell something of the story of that sedate and 
 carefully- made-up man, in the drawing on 
 page T^j, who is crossing the street and holds 
 a little child by the hand ? He is a widower, 
 clearly, and one who, I think, will never 
 marry again. There is something of a set 
 and square resolve about his prosaic, practical 
 appearance which seems to tell of a man who 
 will bear his loss bravely and not make 
 futile attempt to repair it. How entirely 
 different a picture is given by the other man, 
 on page 2)2)^ who, with a little girl, is cross- 
 ing the street somewhere near the young 
 engineer! This man is jaunty, bright, very 
 well dressed, very well satisfied with himself.
 
 44 Charing Cross to St. PaiiTs 
 
 Either he is a young married man rather 
 proud of walking out with his child and of 
 beinof allowed to take care of her all alone, 
 or the child is only a little sister of his— but 
 this latter theory somehow does not quite 
 satisfy me. No ; I am sure he is a married 
 man, and his wife is well and happy, but has 
 not been able to come out w^ith him, and he 
 has taken the little girl to be his companion. 
 
 What different ways people have of 
 crossing a street ! Some men have such 
 nerves that they can wind in and out among 
 the cabs, and carts, and omnibuses, in 
 imminent momentary danger which makes 
 a mere looker-on tremble, and they never 
 seem to think that they are in danger, but 
 avoid every impingement and collision with 
 the easy skill of a bull-fighter. See that man 
 there — the wheel of a hansom has just 
 brushed him and he steps ever so little aside 
 and is unharmed. But the next moment he 
 has come right in the way of a tearing 
 omnibus, and the driver halloos to him and 
 he coolly looks up and then allows just
 
 ■i 
 
 *nr.'-. ,? 
 
 .'.us 
 
 
 jv---: 
 
 
 
 
 L F1«Wl.fo 
 
 
 
 - ■ ■.■■■..■ y 
 
 I'Ti' 
 
 
 
 ST. martin's in THK FIELDj
 
 Charing Cross 47 
 
 enough space for the omnibus to pass, 
 while at the same time he contrives to 
 keep his head barely clear of the huge planks 
 that are being dragged on a great cart at 
 his other side. The special danger of the 
 London streets is in the variety of the 
 wheeled traffic. You manage to get safely 
 in front of an omnibus and quite clear of it, 
 but you had not noticed the hansom cab 
 which was coming rapidly along on the 
 other side of the omnibus, and which now 
 darts between you and the sidewalk for 
 which you were making. While you are 
 trying to dodge the cab, behold a mail-cart 
 threatens you from one direction and a 
 bicycle throbs its shrill llight and rattles 
 its bell at you from another. The traffic up 
 and down Broadway, New York, is prob- 
 ably greater than that of any part of London, 
 but then it is nearly all heavy traffic — 
 waggons and street cars and tramcars. There 
 are fev/ hansoms, few light carriages, and 
 therefore few surprises for the pedestrian 
 trying to cross from one side to the other.
 
 48 C/mriiio Cross to Si. Paur s 
 
 To do our cab-drivers, especially the drivers 
 of hansom cabs, justice, it must be said that 
 they are wonderfully skilful and careful. If 
 they drove with the recklessness of the 
 Parisian drivers, London streets would be 
 covered with the killed and wounded. Few 
 sights inspire me more with curious admira- 
 tion than to see a London gamin — perhaps 
 a newsboy, perhaps a lad who gathers up 
 street refuse — to see the joyous recklessness 
 with which he disports himself among the 
 wheels of the carriac'es and the hoofs of the 
 horses. It is as if he could not be hurt by 
 them, as if the danger that existed for others 
 was no dancrer at all for him. He reminds 
 me of the boy or girl of some far southern 
 island disporting in the long sea-rollers flung 
 in upon the beach. This southern island 
 child is amphibious ; has no more thought of 
 danger from the waves than of danger from 
 the pebbles on the beach ; tumbles about as 
 easily as if swimming in the sea and racing 
 on the shore were just the same thing. So 
 with the London street gamin. He is quite
 
 Charing Cross 49 
 
 used to running in and running about amid 
 the wheels and the hoofs, and he doesn't 
 mind, bless you, and as I heard one of them 
 say one day, " There ain't no harm going 
 to happen to me." And I don't believe 
 that any harm does happen to him in that 
 way. 
 
 But look at some women crossing a street. 
 I do not say that all women are bad at it. 
 Some are composed, self-possessed, and 
 majestic ; they sail in and out among the 
 cabs and omnibuses like stately yachts 
 through a fleet of ironclads. Such a woman 
 is now crossing near the Strand end of 
 Morley's Hotel (see page 41); she holds a 
 little girl by the hand and guides her ; she 
 moves slowly, steadily, hardly seeming to 
 look either to the right or to the left, and 
 yet with her calm eyes wide open to every- 
 thing that concerns herself and her charge. 
 Look at her — is she not a typical London 
 figure ? See how well she is dressed — with 
 her fur-trimmed jacket tight over her firm, 
 opulent bust, her skirts kilted exactly to the 
 
 E
 
 50 Charing Cross to St. Paurs 
 
 right height for a walk in London streets, her 
 bonnet of the style next to the very newest 
 — she would not think it quite right to have 
 the very, very newest style of bonnet — her 
 veil is drawn tightly across the upper part 
 of her face and reaches just down to the tip 
 of her nose ; she is proper, prim, sensible, 
 conscientious, innocent — probably never had 
 a wrong thought in her life ; her views, 
 indeed, are limited — propriety is everything 
 with her ; she is the sort of woman who 
 would not consider it by any means proper 
 to wear very smart and lacey petticoats or 
 other such garments ; she has not two ideas 
 in her head, and neither she nor anybody 
 else would know what she could do with 
 them if she had. Just now, however, I am 
 watching her as she crosses the street, and I 
 am full of admiration for her cool, successful 
 composure. That is the woman who would 
 not wince in a cold shower-bath when she 
 had just pulled the string, I need not 
 follow her in her passage — she will get 
 across quite safely. But see how other
 
 Charing Cross 5 1 
 
 women — the great majority of women — 
 conduct themselves when they have to make 
 a more or less perilous crossing. They 
 begin with a sudden dart, then they think 
 better of it, and come to a dead stand in the 
 middle of the street just at the wronof time : 
 then they try to run back again, and their 
 affrighted gambolings sometimes stop the 
 march of a streetful of traffic. I have seen 
 women on the footpath of some perfectly 
 quiet and little-frequented street pause a 
 moment and take a long and anxious look 
 up and down the thoroughfare, satisfy them- 
 selves that no vehicle of any kind is in sight 
 either way, and then gather up their drapery 
 in the most awkward and ungainly fashion 
 and run as fast as their legs can carry them 
 across to the other side, which they reach 
 all panting and red with the air of ship- 
 wrecked people who have just managed to 
 get on to a rock. I have seen women pause 
 and look anxiously round and let the moment 
 pass when there was a safe gap in the traffic, 
 and then, just as the noisy waves begin to
 
 52 Charing Cross to St. PmiVs 
 
 roll on again, suddenly make the dart at the 
 wrong time, to the imminent peril of their 
 lives. Worst of all is when there are two 
 or three women together. They start off at 
 the same time, but the moment they are in 
 motion each seems to take a different view 
 of the duties of the occasion. One thinks 
 she had better rush on ; another espies 
 danger in that way, and quickly resolves to 
 run back ; a third comes to the conclusion 
 that the best thino^ to do is to remain in the 
 middle of the street. If each would be 
 content to follow her own impulse and do 
 nothing else it would not be quite so bad, 
 but each wants to coerce her companions to 
 do what she is doing, and there is a scene 
 of pulling and pushing and arguing, and how 
 any one of them ever comes alive out of that 
 peril is more than I can understand. I do 
 not want to put undue limitation on the 
 rights of women, but I must say that I do 
 not think a woman — at all events a modern 
 and civilised woman — ever ouQ'ht to run. 
 Atalanta, of course — well and good — she was
 
 7: ate«^$^-'^r=' 
 
 
 

 
 C ha ring Cross 55 
 
 a sort of professional, and she got herself up 
 for the task ; she did not wear long skirts 
 and high-heeled shoes and a bonnet with a 
 little shrubbery or orchard or aviary on the 
 top of it. Camilla, too, had a right to run — 
 her tunic was short, and the grasses did not 
 bend under her lio-htsome buskins — at least 
 so the poet says, and poets ought to know 
 — but the woman of modern civilisation and 
 dress ouoht never to run. 
 
 We see a good deal of the soldier in 
 these sketches. He is mostly a cavalryman, 
 with his cap on the side of his head and 
 his curious air of lounging alertness, not 
 exactly swagger — there is too much self- 
 complacency and self-content in him to call 
 for the airs of a man who feels that he is 
 bound to swao-aer. Can one wonder that the 
 cavalryman is such a hero and idol to the 
 servant-girl ? Look at him, with his scarlet 
 coat, his jingling spurs, his sabre, his 
 moustache, his gold lace, his shiny buttons, 
 his smart jacket, his tall, well-knit figure, 
 and put yourself, if you can, in poor Mary
 
 56 Charing Cross to St. Pant's 
 
 Jane's place, and think what a god of her 
 idolatry he well may be ! Think of the 
 butcher's boy and the baker's boy who are 
 her usual morning callers, and think how they 
 would look beside that gorgeous soldier ! 
 Is there any corresponding womanly 
 splendour which could equally dazzle the 
 butcher's boy or the baker's boy ? Does any 
 woman ever come in his way as supremely 
 dazzling and overawing as the cavalryman 
 is to the maiden of the kitchen ? Let us try 
 to think. A ballet girl, perhaps, with her 
 gauzy petticoats, and her pink legs, and her 
 powdered and rouged face, and her smiles, 
 and her suppleness, and her general splendour 
 of attire ? Well, no doubt she must seem to 
 him like some creature from another sphere. 
 And then the circus -ridinof woman in the 
 velvet bodice and the short skirts and the 
 pretty buskins, who stands upright on the 
 horse's back and leaps through all the crash- 
 ing hoops, and then at intervals drops down 
 into the saddle again with pretty pantings 
 of fatigue and bewitching litde shudders of
 
 Charing Cross 57 
 
 exhaustion ; surely she must seem a vision 
 of youth, beauty, and spangles — a plump 
 phantom, if there could be such a thing, of 
 delight ? Yes, we may admit the ballet 
 girl and the circus-riding girl ; we may admit 
 that they must in their radiance shine as 
 dazzlingly on the butcher's boy and the 
 baker's boy as even the cavalryman shines 
 upon Mary Jane. But look at the difference. 
 Where, I should like to know, is the ballet 
 girl or the circus-riding woman who would 
 condescend to go out for a walk with the 
 young butcher or baker ? He might as well 
 expect Miss Ethel Newcome or Miss Mary 
 Anderson to go out a-walking with him. 
 So these divine creatures are divine indeed 
 for him ; they are stars that shine on him 
 from a far sky, not lamps that burn to light 
 his lowly way. But Mary Jane walks out 
 with her cavalryman on the Sunday, leans 
 upon his heroic arm, looks up lovingly into 
 his eyes, sits beside him on the bench in one 
 of the parks, is "a part of his life," as the 
 heroines in the novels put it. Therefore,
 
 58 Charing Cross to St. PaiiVs 
 
 Mary Jane's experience with her soldier 
 lover is an experience that, to my mind, is 
 quite unique. Aladdin with the princess was 
 not in it, if a comparison had to be made. 
 I begin to feel sorry for all poor young 
 princesses. They could not by any human 
 possibility find any mortal lover so delight- 
 fully above them in heroic splendour as 
 Mary Jane has found in her cavalryman. 
 Is she not on the Sunday the happiest of 
 human beings ? 
 
 Very likely she is, but I once caught a 
 glimpse of a face at Charing Cross one hot 
 clay of last summer which expressed a greater 
 concentration of happiness than I had ever 
 seen on the human countenance before, or 
 perhaps shall ever see there again. It was 
 a hot day — glowingly, gloriously hot. Out- 
 side a public-house door stood the driver of 
 a four-wheeler, his cab waiting for him. He 
 held in one hand a pot of beer from which 
 he had been taking a deep draught. He 
 held the vessel sideways in his hand, and 
 seeing that there was a good deal left he
 
 1 ' 4 '— 
 
 o 
 o 
 
 u 
 
 <: 
 
 Hi 
 
 o
 
 CJiarino- Cross 6i 
 
 stopped for a moment to think over the 
 joy of the occasion and to take it in and 
 become equal to it. There he was, happy 
 in the past, in the present, in the near future. 
 The pleasures of memory, the pleasures of 
 hope, the pleasures of imagination ! Think 
 of that first deep, long draught ! How de- 
 lightful in the mere memory ! That man 
 would not abate one jot of the heat of that 
 day lest in doing so he might lose any of 
 the joy of the deep drink. But then, in this 
 present interval of delight, and while he is 
 allowing the witchery of the first draught 
 to gladden his veins and his senses, comes 
 the knowledge that there is a still deeper 
 draught yet awaiting his good pleasure. So 
 he pauses in his drink, slants the pot a little, 
 looks down tenderly into its dark foam- 
 curdled pool, and still thrilling with the joy 
 of the past drink, anticipates the rapture of 
 the drink that is soon to come. No, I never 
 saw in life or in art any human face so 
 beamino- so radiant with an all -ineffable 
 delight, as the face of that cabman on that
 
 62 Char ill o- Cross to St. Paiir s 
 
 hot day at Charing Cross with his porter- 
 pot in his hand. Have we got him in any 
 of these sketches ? No, not exactly. We 
 have not got him ; but we have got his cab. 
 There it stands in the sketch of the street 
 near the Eleanor's Cross. The cab, yes ; 
 but why not the cabman ? Can you not 
 guess ? Why, of course, because the artist, 
 like a true man of genius, recognised the 
 fact that no mortal hand or earthly pencil 
 could reproduce the expression of that 
 measureless content — and the joy of the 
 cabman's countenance, like the grief of 
 Agamemnon's kingly face, was purposely 
 evaded by art, and left unillustrated. Art 
 bowed to each, sighed, and turned deliber- 
 ately, nobly, resignedly away.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE STRAND 
 
 I REGRET not being a man of fortune. I am 
 sincere in the expression of that regret. I 
 reo-ret the fact because amono; other reasons 
 I am denied the luxury of studying such 
 streets as the Strand from the summit of an 
 omnibus. A man whose time is his only 
 money cannot afford so costly a joy. The 
 top of the omnibus is the seat for the idle — 
 for those to whom time is a thing to be killed 
 like game, or for the hard-worked and poor, 
 whose hours after work is done are, in the 
 money sense, valueless. But a man like my- 
 self may not afford omnibuses. He must take 
 the frequent hansom. If he goes about much 
 he lives half his life in hansoms. He has
 
 64 Charing Cross to St. PaitTs 
 
 to do it. It would not be satisfactory to 
 save a few shillings by taking omnibuses, 
 and as a reward for his economy have to put 
 up with the loss of a few guineas. I have 
 not been on the top of an omnibus for years 
 and years, but I have many pleasant memo- 
 ries of long, delightful journeys thus made 
 in days when all the world was younger, 
 and seemed to me to be a good deal less 
 in a hurry. I gaze with envy on the people 
 who sit enthroned on the roof of the penny 
 omnibus in Mr. Pennell's lively sketch. How 
 characteristic are the faces of these people ! 
 See the rather pretty young woman with her 
 veil drawn midway down her nose, and the 
 foreign gentleman, with the moustache and 
 the eyeglasses, and the self-assertive hat. 
 And look at the elderly woman inside the 
 'bus. I should like to be on the top of that 
 omnibus and to go whithersoever it went, 
 and then to come back with it again. I used 
 to love that sort of thing when I was a very 
 young man studying London as a stranger 
 — the only way in which London is really to
 
 T/ic Strand 65 
 
 be studied. It used to be a favourite way of 
 mine to hail the first omnibus I saw and 
 scramble on to the roof, which was a feat 
 of gymnastics in those days — we had no 
 spiral staircases to our omnibuses then — a feat 
 no woman ever ventured to accomplish, or 
 even attempt — and let it carry me whither it 
 would. I well knew that it could not carry 
 me to any region or any street which would 
 not be full of interest for me. I should like 
 to make some expeditions of that kind even 
 now, and survey the streets and the crowds, 
 and call up recollections of other such rides 
 long ago, and revive reminiscences in every 
 place. 
 
 I knew, long ago, of two brothers, young 
 lads, in a seaport town in one of these islands, 
 who in all their love of the river and the sea, 
 and their boat and the broken waves, still 
 yearned above all things to see London. 
 London was to them simply the London of 
 Shakespeare and of Dickens and Thackeray. 
 They used to spend hours in picturing to 
 themselves the delis^hts of livinsf in London.
 
 66 Charinz Cross to St. Pant' s 
 
 ^> 
 
 They proposed to live in some pretty suburb, 
 and to go to town every morning and re- 
 turn every evening on the top of an omnibus. 
 This was their modest idea of hfe ; they did 
 not stop to think of any particuhir quarter of 
 London as more desirable to live in than 
 another ; the point of the thing was the fact 
 of their living in London, and in that sense 
 being the owners of it — able to go about it 
 and study it and be happy in it. It was a 
 sort of London mania which was very con- 
 tagious in those days among boys who had 
 never been in London, and it got its chief 
 impulse from Dickens. The elder of the 
 boys came to London and settled there, and 
 has been living there a great many years, 
 and of course sees little or nothing of London 
 now. The younger lad never saw London 
 at all. He went out to the United States to 
 make a fortune, with the express intention of 
 returning to Europe and living in London. 
 He never returned. The Civil War broke 
 out, and although he never was wounded, 
 yet in the damp night-watches and in the
 
 
 V 
 
 ^-v.-,. 
 
 
 
 
 
 N .-^\\ '111 /-» '.s ■ Jl r'-L ... . 
 
 
 Mral' .'AV'i.-'Xi 
 
 mmM^' 
 
 mmfw 
 
 
 //J 
 
 a)*/H 
 
 ^1^ lyv ^^' 
 
 ,M? 
 
 y 
 
 IN THE STKANU
 
 The Strand 69 
 
 intrenchments the seeds were sown of the 
 disease of which he died. And so he never 
 saw London — never once. And I, passing 
 through London this way and that, and 
 wholly without noticing the streets and 
 houses, suddenly happen to remember these 
 old-time fancy ings and aspirations, and to 
 see him. There are a good many ghosts 
 about the Strand that the Strand never sees. 
 The lono-er one lives in London, the more 
 the Strand comes to be a phantom-haunted 
 thoroughfare. 
 
 Now, take the region which Mr. Pennell 
 has chosen to picture in the sketch I have 
 already mentioned — the sketch which brings 
 in the penny omnibus. It is in the close 
 neiafhbourhood of Somerset House. To me 
 that part of the Strand is haunted by many 
 ghosts — "the forms that men spy with the 
 half-shut eye." Some memories of a vanished 
 Bohemia of literature and art haunt me as 
 I look on Mr. Pennell's sketch. Do I not 
 remember a gifted, eccentric Bohemian who 
 used to haunt a restaurant on the left side of
 
 JO Charing Cross to St. PauF s 
 
 the Strand as you go eastward to St, Paul's, 
 and almost exactly opposite to the spot where 
 Mr. Pennell's policeman checks the too reck- 
 less advance of one of Mr. Pennell's life-like, 
 liv^ing hansom cabs ? Do I not remember the 
 account he used to give of his effort to find 
 "a basis of operations" for the livelihood of 
 the day '^ When he had twopence he was 
 ready to start. He made for this particular 
 restaurant, and he ordered a cup of coffee. 
 One could get a cup of coffee for twopence 
 in those days — can one now ? I do not know ; 
 I do not drink coffee. There he had his 
 basis of operations. He lingered over his 
 coffee until some Bohemian friend lounged 
 in, who, seeing him, invited him to have a 
 drink. My hero declined, was pressed, 
 declined again, and then compromised by 
 saying he didn't mind accepting a veal-and- 
 ham pie. So there he is started. With a 
 veal-and-ham pie and a cup of coffee, a man 
 who can digest such food is prepared to 
 begin the world. Then, later on, another 
 friend drops in, and our hero is now suffi-
 
 ^^VV 
 
 THE STRAND
 
 The Strand j-^ 
 
 ciently fortified to accept a pint of half-and- 
 half. Then he starts out in pursuit of work. 
 He drops in upon editors and sub-editors, he 
 pays a visit to publishers ; perhaps he gets 
 an order for some job of literary work — 
 perhaps he even gets payment for some job 
 already done— and then he goes to his rooms, 
 or his room, wherever the location may be, 
 and if he has work to do he does it, and 
 if he has had a cheque he goes back with a 
 light heart to the restaurant I have described 
 and he orders a dinner, and if any of his 
 friends be round, he stands a dinner bravely, 
 and so pays off the frequent veal-and-ham 
 pies and the pints of half-and-half, and he is 
 started in the world once aQ;ain. It will not 
 matter if for another week he is impecunious, 
 he will not be as Dr. Johnson subscribed 
 himself, " Impransus" — he will not be in the 
 condition of wanting a dinner. Only he 
 must have his basis of operations to begin 
 with — he has his code of honour like another. 
 He will not q-q into that favourite haunt 
 without the means of calling for something
 
 74 C/iariiig Cross to St. Paiirs 
 
 at once and of paying for it on the nail. 
 With that to begin with he is safe. I think 
 with a genuine pleasure that it was my happy 
 chance on more than one occasion to advance 
 the modest- sum which enabled him fairly to 
 enter the day's battle of life. He was a man 
 of principle : he never sought to borrow more 
 than was needed to lay down the basis of 
 operations. He is dead long since. Earth 
 lie light upon his grave — that is, if he cares 
 whether it lies light or heavy. He made 
 life lie more lightly than it otherwise might 
 have done for many of us in those far-off 
 days when the Strand was yet a wilderness 
 of possibilities, a garden of romance, a battle- 
 field from which one mioht come back a 
 conquering hero, or on which one might, like 
 my poor friend, "yield his broken sword to 
 Fate the Conqueror." I do not suppose 
 that sort of bitter struggle for life goes on 
 now among the younger men who are fight- 
 ing their way into London literature. I 
 hope not. There are so many more news- 
 papers and magazines of all kinds that fair
 
 The Strand 75 
 
 employment ought to be got much more 
 easily now than it was then. I am glad if 
 all the old irregular days of literature are 
 gone. I am entirely in favour of regularity 
 and order ; but it must be owned that the 
 gipsy is artistically a much more interesting 
 personage than the beadle, or even the 
 policeman. 
 
 " Hallo, my fancy ! whither wilt thou 
 go ? " I have been wandering away from 
 Mr. Pennell's sketches of to-day's London 
 into a London of I do not want to say how- 
 many years ago. Anyhow, it was a London 
 when Thackeray, and Dickens, and Mark 
 Lemon, and John Leech, and Shirley Brooks, 
 and Leicester Buckingham, and Edward 
 Whitty were still alive. But although one 
 ought to keep to the Strand of the present, 
 one cannot do It if he has any memories. 
 The real and the unreal, the present and 
 the past, get so mixed up that they cannot 
 be kept asunder. Why, there is not a 
 house, not a shop, we pass on our way 
 eastward from Charincr Cross to St. Paul's,
 
 76 Charing Cross to St. Paurs 
 
 that has not a story and an association for 
 nie — a story and an association connected 
 with some individuality of man or woman 
 to which I could put a name. Stop me 
 at any house you please on either side of 
 the Strand, and I shall have something to 
 tell you associated with that particular house 
 and none other. Perhaps I have never 
 crossed its threshold : what does that matter ? 
 I met some one, saw some one pass, just 
 outside that shop ; some great man, perhaps, 
 whose face I then looked on for the first 
 time, and do you think I could ever forget 
 that shop ? See ! from the windows of that 
 house near Exeter Hall I saw Kossuth go by 
 — saw that serene, majestic face, then one of 
 the handsomest faces one could look on — 
 saw him go by with the adoring crowd about 
 him. He was indeed the lion of a season 
 then — Kossuth then, Stanley the other day 
 — and in between how many and in what a 
 strange succession ! The Emperor of the 
 French one day, and Garibaldi another, 
 and the Shah, and the Czar, and Buffalo
 
 EXETliK HALL
 
 The Strand 79 
 
 Bill ! Not a spot along the whole length 
 of the Strand but I associate it with some 
 name and face of a passing celebrity. Just 
 there, at the spot where Wellington Street 
 touches the south side of the Strand, I saw 
 Dickens for the last time. They have a 
 saying in New York that if you take your 
 stand on a certain part of Broadway, you 
 will see everybody you want to see. The 
 same thing might have been said, and much 
 more aptly, of the Strand at one time. 
 Perhaps it is not quite the same now. 
 Westward the course of celebrity takes its 
 way. 
 
 Exeter Hall ! I have mentioned Exeter 
 Hall, and here is the place itself as shown 
 by Mr. Pennell. Exeter Hall is an institu- 
 tion ; it has a history ; its history ought to 
 be written. I think the book would take 
 — "The History of Exeter Hall." Forty 
 years must have gone by since Macaulay 
 roused a storm of anger against him by his 
 famous allusion to " the bray of Exeter 
 Hall." That was in the time when Exeter
 
 So CJiaring Cross to St. Paurs 
 
 Hall was associating itself mainly with move- 
 ments against the Pope and the Jesuits, 
 and against the political emancipation of 
 the Jews. But Exeter Hall, apart from 
 questions of creed altogether, has been the 
 nursery of many a noble agitation in a 
 Qfood cause. The first time I ever heard 
 Mr. Henry Ward Beecher speak was at a 
 meeting in Exeter Hall. It was while the 
 Civil War was going on in America, and 
 he had come over to plead the cause of the 
 North. The meeting was got up by the 
 friends of the North, but the Southern cause 
 was very popular in London society then, 
 and there were numbers of the advocates of 
 the South in the hall that night. Beecher's 
 speech was rudely, and even savagely, 
 interrupted in the beginning, but before 
 long he made his opponents listen to him. 
 I think Beecher was the most dexterous and 
 powerful platform speaker I ever listened 
 to, and that night he was put upon his 
 mettle. His self-possession was superb ; 
 his good-humour unconquerable ; his voice
 
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 The Strand - 83 
 
 splendid ; his readiness of reply was as the ex- 
 plosion following the spark. He was making 
 some allusion to religion in the North, when 
 some one sarcastically called out, " Religion 
 and war ! " meaning to imply thereby, no 
 doubt, that religious nations do not carry 
 on war. Beecher caught at the interruption. 
 "Religion and war.'*" he exclaimed; "and 
 what is the national emblem borne by the 
 flag of England ? Is it not the cross upon 
 the field of blood ? " At that time there 
 was felt some dissatisfaction in England 
 about an over- enthusiastic welcome given 
 to certain Russian princes in the United 
 States. We were then full of horror at the 
 suppression of the Polish rebellion, and we 
 hated the Russians. A voice called out 
 during one of Beecher's thrilling sentences, 
 "What about the Russians?" Beecher 
 understood the meaning of the question, and 
 he gave it a prompt reply. " I suppose," 
 he said in a grave, deep tone, " you mean 
 to condemn some of our great folks in my 
 country because they seem to be coquetting
 
 84 CJiaring Cross to St. Paul's 
 
 with the Russians who enslave the Poles ? 
 You are grieved that they should do so. 
 Well, so am I ; and you will all the better 
 understand how grieved we feel when your 
 great folks coquette with the Southerners 
 who enslave the negroes." The reply was 
 all the more effective because it assumed 
 the perfect good faith of the interruption, 
 and admitted a sympathy with its purpose. 
 
 How well Mr. Pennell has rendered the 
 austere aspect of Exeter Hall ! No doubt 
 he draws every scene exactly as he sees it 
 and finds it — but if we did not know this we 
 might be inclined to believe that he had 
 exercised a little poetic fancy in making the 
 very passers-by applicable in appearance to 
 the character and the associations of the 
 building. Observe the man with the strictly 
 sleek hat and the shaven face and the eye- 
 glass, looking indeed in some ways a good 
 deal like a certain distinguished statesman 
 and debater who has lately been occupying a 
 very prominent and peculiar position. But 
 this gentleman in the street picture, how
 
 The Strand 85 
 
 entirely in liarniony he is with the aspect of 
 Exeter Hall ! He is so primly well dressed, 
 so very sedate and proper. And the cab- 
 men, one this way, two that, drive slowly by 
 as if they were passing a church during 
 service-time. Contrast that scene with the 
 look of the little crowd round the Gaiety, 
 where, as we see, "Faust up to Date" was 
 still going on. To be sure this latter crowd 
 is a crowd attracted by " Faust up to Date" 
 — it is a Gaiety crowd altogether. Where 
 the Gaiety door is, there will the Johnnies 
 and chappies be. But the Exeter Hall 
 scene is a happy accident, for there does not 
 seem to be any meeting going on just then 
 inside, and the chance of street traffic 
 enabled the artist to make the whole sketch 
 a piece of harmony. It is worth while to 
 notice the different appearance and manner 
 of two men who are passing the door of the 
 Gaiety, but do not belong to the crowd. 
 They are much more in the foreground : of 
 one we see only the head and shoulders. 
 He is well dressed, but there is something
 
 86 C/iarinQ' Cross to St. J^iiiTs 
 
 distinctly provincial about him. He turns to 
 look at the crowd with interest and sym- 
 
 'ji. A/ y^ fi 
 
 
 m, . jc... J V -' ■■ ±.^-i-, , 1.1,11111. -Hi,,, iii.-Mi A'4u^— » 
 
 
 THE GAIETY 
 
 pathy. He is not going in himself; he has r'' ) 
 some appointment which takes him else- 
 where ; but he would go in if he could. Yet 
 he is not in any disappointed mood. 1 am
 
 The Strand 87 
 
 sure he likes well to go where he is going, and 
 does not envy those who have places in the 
 Gaiety. Only he is a distinct sympathiser — 
 he has been there before, and is sure to go 
 again some night before he leaves town. 
 But now look at the man with the soft felt 
 hat, the close-cropped hair, and the mous- 
 tache and beard. He goes grimly, morosely 
 on, and never turns one glance on the 
 frivolous little crowd round the Gaiety door. 
 His mood is not in sympathy with such 
 doings. He holds his mouth firmly shut; 
 he looks straight before him in a dogged 
 sort of way. Who is he, and what is the 
 matter with him ? Is he an artisan of the 
 better class on strike ? Is he a conspirator ? 
 Is he a man of naturally stern mood who 
 hates amusement of all kind ? I rather lean 
 to the theory of the conspirator. He is one 
 of some foreign fraternity, and something is 
 in preparation about which he has no great 
 hope, and he passes along the Strand brood- 
 ing over it, and does not even know that 
 there is a crowd of pleasure-seekers obstruct-
 
 88 Charing Cross to St. Paiirs 
 
 ing a part of the pavement. He moves 
 along as unnoticed by them as his purpose 
 is unknown to them. He and the young 
 man from the country will pass each other 
 closely in another second or two, but they 
 have no more to do with each other than two 
 ships that pass wide-parted on the ocean. 
 
 One could spin a little story out of almost 
 every figure in these sketches — ^just as one 
 could out of almost each separate figure in 
 the actual life of the Strand. Because the 
 artist has made each of his figures so full of 
 life, so living, and where there is life there is 
 story, as surely as where there is substance 
 there also is shadow. But whether the life 
 be the substance and the story the shadow, 
 or the story the substance and the life only 
 the poor shadow, I do not venture to say. 
 It would carry one too far away to try to 
 work out that problem. There is a figure, 
 for instance, in the sketch which contains the 
 omnibus — a figure ready-made for a story. 
 It is the fioure of a man who is crossincr to 
 the north side of the Strand, close to where
 
 "in 
 
 WELLINGTON STKEET
 
 The Si rand g i 
 
 the policeman checks the cab. There is a 
 keen, cold March wind blowing ; you can see 
 that it is so by the manner in which the man 
 keeps his hands deep set in his pockets, and 
 by the shuddering outlines of his gaunt 
 figure. He is very poorly dressed — those 
 trousers and those boots speak eloquently, 
 far too eloquently, the tale of " Hard-up." 
 The whole sketch is only a few black 
 touches, but we get the man complete and 
 living, and we can easily find out his story. 
 He has seen better days. He started in life 
 well, but indolence first and misfortune after 
 told against him, and he was never a man to 
 fight stoutly against enemies, and if Fate 
 stared hard into his face to stare sternly back 
 at her^ — and so he succumbed and went 
 down and down. Fate is very cowardly ; 
 she delio-hts to inflict chastisement on those 
 who readily submit to her ; and on the ill- 
 booted heels of this poor man " unmerciful 
 disaster followed fast and followed faster." 
 There was a girl once who loved him, 
 shabby poor rascal as he looks now — she
 
 92 Charing Cross to St. Pan Is 
 
 loved him and would have risked her happi- 
 ness with him, but he had no ambition and 
 he had no real courage, and she saw all this, 
 and turned away disappointed — and she is 
 happily married now, and only sometimes 
 remembers the good-for-nothing lover of 
 former days — the man with the old boots 
 and with his hands in his pockets. See, 
 even against the March wind he has not the 
 courage to stand up stiff and defiant. He 
 cowers and cringes before it as he cowered 
 and cringed before other antagonists, and 
 this is what he has come to. Let him pass ; 
 let us not follow him to his lonely home : no 
 one could do any good for him ever again. 
 
 We get more than one impression of the 
 Lyceum in these sketches. We see it by day- 
 light, we see it by lamplight. The Lyceum, 
 like Exeter Hall, is an institution, only of a 
 different kind, and ought to have its history. 
 My first recollection of the Lyceum goes back 
 to the days of Charles Mathews and Madame 
 Vestris. I was new to London then, and I 
 had never seen such acting as that of Charles
 
 THE i.ycp:cm
 
 The Strand 95 
 
 Mathews. I have seen a good many actors 
 in a good many countries since that time, but 
 I have never seen any one who could surpass 
 Charles Mathews in light comedy. He holds 
 in my recollection a place absolutely distinct, 
 apart, entirely to himself. However, I am 
 now discoursing not of Charles Mathews ex- 
 clusively, but only of Charles Mathews as a 
 figure in the history of the Lyceum. Then 
 there comes a blank in my memory for some 
 years, and Charles Mathews has ceased to be 
 associated with the Lyceum, and all London 
 that cares about acting at all is rushing to 
 the Lyceum to see another Charles — Charles 
 Fechter — act in " Ruy Bias." What a sen- 
 sation that was ! " Yesterday I was your 
 servant; to-day I am your executioner!" 
 How the pit rose at these words, and the 
 magnificent gesture which gave effect to 
 them ! The Lyceum then fairly conquered 
 Fashion. For at that time Fashion in 
 London had given up going to what we 
 call "the theatre," in the ordinary sense, and 
 only professed to go to the Opera. But
 
 96 Charing Cross to St. Pattr s 
 
 Fechtcr, with his success, seized the heads 
 of Fashion's horses, and turned the carriao-e 
 round, and compelled it to land its master 
 and mistress at the doors of the Lyceum 
 Theatre. Then came "The Duke's Motto," 
 which delighted Fashion even more than 
 " Ruy Bias" had done. The unspeakably 
 gallant and graceful bearing of the hero when 
 he was playing his own part ; the marvellous 
 subtlety and craft when he was playing the 
 part of the hunchback ; the exquisite grace 
 of Kate Terry, then in all the brightness and 
 freshness of youth ; the winning archness of 
 Carlotta Leclercq, and the brilliant closing 
 scene, "ringed with a flame of fair faces and 
 splendid with swords," all this charmed the 
 town with a new and delightful sensation. 
 Then came the " Hamlet" over which there 
 was so much controversy — the Hamlet of 
 Delaroche, the Hamlet of Goethe, the 
 Hamlet of the flaxen locks. That was the 
 zenith of Fechter's fame ; the rest was gradual 
 descent. The last time I saw Fechter was 
 at a dinner of the " Saturday Club " in
 
 The Strand 97 
 
 Boston, Massachusetts. Members of the 
 club were allowed on certain days to intro- 
 duce each a guest to the dinner ; Fechter 
 was the guest of Longfellow, I of Emerson. 
 Wendell Holmes was there. But I am 
 wandering away from the Lyceum. 
 
 Years go on, and there is another Hamlet 
 in possession of the Lyceum, with another 
 Miss Terry for the fair Ophelia ; and Irving, 
 too, has conquered Fashion, and made it a 
 captive at the wheels of his chariot. For 
 a while he disappears — is off to America to 
 become the star of the New World theatres, 
 and Mary Anderson makes her first appear- 
 ance at the Lyceum, and bewitches her 
 audience with Parthenia. She is timid at first, 
 and speaks in a low tone. " A litde louder, 
 Mary ! " a voice cries out from the back of 
 the gallery ; and Mary smiles at the well- 
 meant familiarity of the interruption, and she 
 speaks a little louder, and she has scored a 
 new success for the Lyceum. Yet a little, 
 and the Lyceum welcomes w^ith all its accla- 
 mations the almost perfect Daly Company, 
 
 H
 
 98 Chaining Cross to St. PaiiTs 
 
 with its superb actress and great artist, Miss 
 Ada Rehan, and we all acknowledge with 
 ready rapture that " this is the Shrew whom 
 Shakespeare drew." Yes, the Lyceum has a 
 splendid record in the history of the stage. It 
 has been a sort of academy of dramatic art. Its 
 pupils and students go out and teach the v.'orld. 
 The picture-shops and the photographers' 
 used to be the delight of my early days, and 
 indeed I stop every now and then even still 
 to affichcr myself to some winning window. 
 There is one shop — should I call it a shop ? — 
 is not that word far too lowly in its import 
 for the establishment I speak of? — with which 
 I have certain tender associations. Some 
 seventeen or eighteen years ago I was look- 
 ing in at its windows one day, and a story 
 about it came into my mind. I had long- 
 been in the habit of studying its windows. It 
 stands at the corner of one of the streets run- 
 ning off the Strand — but not for worlds would 
 I make known the name of the street at the 
 corner of which it stands — and it exhibits rich 
 store of pictures, statues, statuettes, and curi-
 
 BURLEIGH STREET, STRAND
 
 The Strand loi 
 
 osities — silver, gold, bronze, and all sorts of 
 delightful things. I never was near the place 
 but I went to the windows and studied them. 
 And I got into my mind — it came on me quite 
 suddenly one day — a story about it. How if 
 it should happen to be owned by a man — 
 I do not know to this day who owns it — who 
 had two pretty daughters, and whose highest 
 ambition in life was to have them, or one 
 of them, married into rank ? He had the 
 repute of having plenty of money, and indeed 
 lent, in a private and confidential and per- 
 fectly honourable way, money on the fairest 
 terms to embarrassed gentlemen who were 
 known to him as clients. And everything 
 goes wrong for a while, and everything comes 
 right in the end — and I shall not tell my 
 story all over again : this is not an advertise- 
 ment. Only I am inclined to point out the 
 curious relationship in which a certain house 
 may stand to a writer of fiction — a house 
 which, he knows not how, has inspired him 
 with a subject. In that house are dwelling 
 for him beings whom the owner of the house
 
 I02 Charing Cross to St. Paiirs 
 
 has never met and knows nothing of. I 
 never pass that house but I see my heroine 
 and her shadowy kith and kin, and her lover 
 — and all the rest of them — and the owner 
 of the house, I daresay, never heard of my 
 heroine — and for that matter never heard of 
 me — and I know nothing about him or his 
 family. I only know that I have installed 
 there for myself another family whose names 
 do not appear upon any rate-books, and no 
 member of which ever records a vote at the 
 parliamentary elections for the Strand Division 
 of London. There is another street running 
 off the Strand in the same neighbourhood, a 
 street also running to the river, in which is a 
 house wherein lived one of the heroes of my 
 fiction. There is a set of tiny chambers in 
 Aear Street, off the Strand, about which I 
 dreamed a melancholy little story. It is hard 
 for a somewhat dreamy personage like myself 
 to take the Strand quite seriously. One has 
 made it so unreal — one has hashed up in such 
 inextricable confusion the real and the unreal. 
 The scent that comes from Rimmel's shop
 
 llic Strand 103 
 
 brings back all youth to me. Why ? Simply 
 because I used to look into Rimmel's windows 
 and inhale their scents when I was a very 
 young man. Nothing carries with it a richer 
 association than the breath of some scent. 
 It is like mafjic. Music itself — which is 
 magic — can hardly equal it. You are wander- 
 ing along the streets thinking of nothing — 
 along the Strand — you are moving through 
 just such a crowd as our artist sets living 
 before us — and you are utterly commonplace. 
 And suddenly some breath of perfume is 
 borne in upon you — from a llower-girl's roses, 
 or even from the made-up contents of Rim- 
 mel's window-cases — and behold ! one is living 
 all at once in another and an enchanted world 
 — the world one lived in or fancied he was 
 living in years and years ago. Once, not 
 long since, I was passing down the Strand, 
 and there were some repairs going on — and I 
 caught the odour of a pitch-kettle — and in a 
 moment I was back to the seaport home of my 
 boyhood again, and to the sound of the 
 
 breaking waves.
 
 IV 
 
 THE STRAND [cOlltiimeci) 
 
 There are a few delightful old houses still to 
 be seen at rare intervals on either side of the 
 Strand. They are the old houses with the 
 overshot windows, which suggest the days of 
 Chaucer. Some of them may be seen in 
 Mr. Pennell's sketch of the little crowds 
 looking in at the windows in the near neigh- 
 bourhood of the Strand Theatre. These 
 sacred old-time houses are fast disappearing. 
 Soon they will have gone altogether. Every 
 lover of poetry and history and art, of what- 
 ever kind, ought to be sorry when these 
 houses and their memories are eone. I find 
 no fault with the spick-and-span new red- 
 brick houses, ever so much more Queen-
 
 THE STRAND, BY SOMERSET HOUSE
 
 The Strand 107 
 
 Annc-likc than the houses of Ouccii Anne's 
 own day. Many of these new houses are 
 very beautiful buildings, and where there are 
 whole streets of them the streets are, happily, 
 not allowed to be monotonous. The archi- 
 tects who deliofhted in such creations as the 
 Quadrant in Regent Street are not in practice 
 now. I should not feel much regret if the 
 revival of Oueen Anne architecture were to 
 mean the pulling down and obliterating all 
 remains of the hideous Georgian houses, 
 with their formal, commonplace monotony. 
 But one must lament for the few really old 
 houses — for the fewer still that are left of the 
 dear, delightful old hostelries. Is there no 
 way of preserving even a few of these old 
 buildings, in order that a future generation 
 may be able quite to understand what 
 Chaucer is talking about sometimes } Could 
 they not be kept up as national monuments .-^ 
 I often wonder that somebody in the United 
 States does not offer to buy some of them, 
 and take them over — stone by stone, brick 
 by brick, rafter by rafter — and set them up
 
 io8 Charin(r Cross to St. PcniTs 
 
 again, all standing, in Central Park, New 
 York, or on Boston Common. I wish some 
 American would make the offer and trans- 
 plant the houses. For over there they would 
 be admired and preserved, but if left to us 
 they are sure to vanish. You can see them 
 better in Mr. Pennell's sketch than you can 
 in the street. In the sketch you can study 
 them at your leisure, and as long as you like ; 
 in the Strand you are hustled along by the 
 crowd, and you can only get a good look at 
 them even for the moment by crossing to the 
 other side of the street. How oddly they 
 contrast with the new houses, some of which 
 are their near neighbours — with the red 
 bricks and the tiles, and the prison-bar-like 
 windows, and the doors set deep in cells, and 
 all the other old -new ornamentations of 
 architecture ! What will some future genera- 
 tion think of this general revival of the age 
 of Oueen Anne — this deliberate architectural 
 masquerade and fancy-dress exposition ? 
 Goethe somewhere said it was well enough 
 to wear fancy dress and become a Turk or a
 
 The Strand 109 
 
 Venetian senator for part of a night, but he 
 could not understand beino^ a sham Turk or 
 Venetian senator for one's whole long life- 
 time. Yet there are people, undoubtedly, 
 who do go through their whole lives thus 
 masquerading — putting on the airs of some- 
 thing they are not, and never were, and 
 never can be. Are we not doing something 
 of the same kind with our streets and our 
 houses ? But the more we carry on this 
 architectural renaissance, the more fondly do 
 I wish we could preserve such of our ancient 
 houses as are still upreared among us. Let 
 us, if possible, have some of the real old time 
 to console us for the unreality of the sham 
 old time. London was real once. Why 
 allow every evidence of the reality to be 
 effaced ? 
 
 Then there comes another thought. 
 Queen Anne revived will, of course, only 
 have her day. Even a ghost cannot live for 
 ever. Men will grow tired of the red-brick 
 houses and the Queen Anneism. They will 
 want something else. In some far-off genera-
 
 I lo Charinz Cross to SL PauTs 
 
 tion is it not possible that a fancy might come 
 up for the revival of Queen Victorlanism in 
 street architecture ? All very well, but what 
 will there be to revive ? The ao^e of Oueen 
 Victoria has not any architecture of its own. 
 It inherited the hideous remains of the 
 Georgian times, and it came in for the 
 restoration of Oueen Anne. If the latter 
 movement goes on much further it will soon 
 have obliterated every trace of the London 
 which Queen Victoria looked on when she 
 went forth to her coronation, or paid her first 
 visit to the House of Lords. To be sure 
 there is what may perhaps be described as 
 the Pimlico order of architecture — the stucco- 
 faced house with its ridiculous attempt at a 
 Greek porch, which house, multiplied by 
 many and divided into two lines, constitutes 
 a Pimlico or "South Belofravia " street. 
 Nothing else in the way of street building 
 ever was half so hideous. The worst of the 
 Georgian streets is like Venice, or Nuremberg, 
 or Oxford, by comparison. It gives one a 
 sinking of the heart to look down the ruthless
 
 "'■/iff '-v^i '■■ f ;'-n^^fT^-^!!|fr^^--i^ T-f 
 
 ^^- 'III ' Miik I •"' r ' 
 
 D 
 O
 
 The Strand 1 13 
 
 monotony of a Pinilico street, with every 
 house exactly the same size and shape as 
 every other, and not a tree to refresh the 
 saddened, sickened eyes. But let us hope 
 that revived Queen Anne may be remorseless, 
 and, Hke the jaws of darkness, devour up 
 these dreadful structures, and leave it to be 
 said in history that in Queen Victoria's age 
 men did not build ; they only revived. 
 
 In the meantime we are in the Strand, 
 and not in Pimlico — for which give praise. 
 The sio'ht of one of the windows in these 
 Chaucerian houses revives the spirits. The 
 prettiest associations curl, and twine, and play 
 about it, like ivy or like smoke. One can see 
 some winsome girl peep out of that window 
 to look at her lover riding by, as he goes 
 westward to attend the King. The. King, of 
 course, is Edward the Third. Why should 
 not the lover be Chaucer himself, in the days 
 of his early courtiership, and his early court- 
 ship '^ Why should not the girl looking out 
 from the window be Philippa herself — the 
 Philippa whom he afterwards married — in the 
 
 I
 
 1 1 4 Charing Cross to St. Paurs 
 
 days before he went soldiering and was taken 
 captive, and got home again, and was made 
 Comptroller of the Customs at the port of 
 London? Yes, Philippa it is, Philippa it shall 
 be, who looks down from her overshot lattice 
 window and sees her courtly, gallant lover ride 
 by ; and he waves his plumed cap to her, and 
 makes his horse caracole just a little to show 
 what he can do in the way of horsemanship, 
 to make her start first and smile afterwards. 
 Somerset House, as we go along, dispels the 
 poetic illusions — for even Old Somerset 
 House, if we could see it, would be far too 
 modern for any association with Chaucerian 
 times, and the Somerset House we look on 
 is a thing of the day before yesterday. 
 
 Look at the ragged woman selling, or 
 trying to sell, her newspapers containing the 
 " result of the Grand National." There are 
 face and figure to bid the poetic begone and 
 the hard, grim realistic take its place. There 
 is the nineteenth -century struggle for life 
 brought down to its meanest, its saddest. 
 Mr. Pennell has done well to fix that figure
 
 The Strand 1 1 5 
 
 on the mind and memory. England's 
 national prestige, the glory of the empire on 
 which the sun never sets — yes, it is splendid 
 to think of that greatness and that glory — 
 but just look there, look at that old woman ! 
 How many hundreds of thousands of her, how 
 many millions of her, I wonder, are there in 
 these two islands ? Some day we shall have 
 to put the big politics, the grand politics, the 
 grandiose politics aside for a little, and 
 take account of her. Now let us buy her 
 paper ; that is about all one can do for her. 
 I do not myself know what the Grand 
 National is, but let us buy a paper for the 
 sake of that poor, ragged old woman, who is 
 certainly national enough in her way, but 
 about whom there is not much of crrandeur 
 anyhow. The sun which never sets on 
 imperial glory has set long since on this poor 
 old daughter of England. Somehow, I don't 
 know how, I cannot think but that her con- 
 dition dims the lustre of imperial glory. I 
 always feel greatly interested in these street 
 fic^ures, as one micrht call them — these in-
 
 I 1 6 Charing Cross to St. PauVs 
 
 habitants of the streets, these poor things, 
 young and old, who make a living in the 
 streets — to whom the pavement of the Strand 
 is their Stock Exchange, their mart, their 
 Royal Academy Exhibition, their court of law, 
 the staoe of their theatre — the tlower-o-irls, 
 the boys who scrape up refuse, the men who 
 sell cheap toys, the men who have stands for 
 the sale of photographs. Now the inventions 
 of science promise by degrees to knock away 
 all their chances of making a living, such as 
 it is, out of the passing crowds on the Strand, 
 We shall stand before a machine, we shall 
 drop a penny and take our chance of a photo- 
 graph^it may be Cardinal Manning or it may 
 be Miss Nellie Farren ; or when some public 
 personage is monopolising attention it may be 
 that he will have a machine all to himself, anci 
 that we shall drop in our penny and take out 
 our photograph of Mr. Stanley. All the same 
 the wandering photograph-seller who lives up 
 and down the Strand will find his poor little 
 business taken clean out of his hands. No 
 doubt we shall have some invention for the
 
 The Strand i i 7 
 
 sale of Mowers in the same way, and the cheap 
 toys will be sold off by process of machinery, 
 and there will be a company started for the 
 mechanical collection of street refuse, and 
 even the sellers of the eveninof editions of the 
 newspapers will find their occupation gone 
 from them. I have often wondered, by the way, 
 why London does not have any street stalls 
 for the sale of newspapers and magazines and 
 cheap books, as the great American cities 
 have. You never need want for a newspaper 
 in a great American city. You have only to 
 keep on a little and you will soon come to a 
 goodly stall on the side -walk, covered up 
 with newspapers, and magazines, and cheap 
 books — ^just, in fact, what you only see at a 
 railway station here. I know what a business 
 it is to get a particular newspaper if you are 
 in the House of Commons and the House 
 does not happen to take that particular news- 
 paper in. You would have to send miles to 
 the newspaper office. I have sometimes 
 crossed to the Westminster Bridge railway 
 station and asked for permission to go on to
 
 1 1 8 Charino- Cross to St. PatiTs 
 
 %b 
 
 the platform and hunt up the paper there. 
 But if our ParHamentary buildings were 
 managed after the fashion of Washington, one 
 would only have to pass out into Westminster 
 Hall to find a capacious bookstall, loaded with 
 all the journalistic and literary delicacies 
 of the season. I do not, somehow, see the 
 great superiority of our system. But in truth 
 we are only beginning to be a newspaper- 
 reading people. We are even yet ever so far 
 behind the people of the United States and 
 the Canadians in that way, and even the 
 people of New York do not, I think, come 
 near the people of tiny little Athens in the 
 passion for the devouring of newspapers. 
 Why, the Square of the Constitution after 
 the cafls have closed looks as if it were 
 covered with snow, owing to the mass of 
 papers lying about that men have read and 
 thrown away. The Viennese, too, are a news- 
 paper-reading population, and so of course are 
 the Parisians. But the Parisians do not touch 
 upon the New Yorkers, nor the New Yorkers 
 upon the Athenians. We Londoners are
 
 ./ - 
 
 
 
 ■aft 'las. 
 
 
 
 
 
 -:W/ 
 
 ST. MARY-LF.-STRANO
 
 The Strand 1 2 1 
 
 pretty low clown so far. For invd^itive energy 
 I think, however, our newspaper-selling boys 
 and men might hold their own against most 
 of their brothers in the trade. The New 
 York newsboy is an astounding little fellow, 
 with his indomitable energy, and his unweary- 
 ing good spirits, and his quenchless eagerness 
 for trade ; but I do not think he allows him- 
 self to invent much. I remember being 
 stopped once in a cab, as I was driving home 
 from a theatre on the Strand, by a boy selling 
 newspapers, who implored me to buy the 
 latest edition, containing the full account of 
 the shooting of Mr. Parnell that evening by 
 Mr. Charles Bradlaugh. I did not purchase, 
 and the event was not recorded in the morn- 
 ing journals of the following day. 
 
 Near the old houses in the Strand Mr. 
 Pennell has given us a characteristic figure. 
 It is that of a man with a great bloated face, 
 and a pipe in his mouth. Probably it is only 
 the human countenance that could be so 
 completely divorced from all shade of expres- 
 sion. No doubt the man is enjoying his
 
 I 2 2 Charincr Cross to St. PatiT s 
 
 pipe, but his face betrays no gleam of 
 deliofbt which mioht Qrive us the satisfaction 
 of knowing that a human creature is happy. 
 He seems to be of the costermonger class, 
 and the costermonger, I should fancy, con- 
 trives to get a good deal of a rough 
 practical sort of enjoyment out of life. But 
 this man is all stolidity. He sucks his pipe 
 and pushes his way, and seems to have no 
 concern with emotion of any kind. This 
 is a face one sees very often in London. 
 One does not see it so often, or often at 
 all, in the great provincial cities, such as 
 Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow — one 
 does not see it at all, I think, in Paris or 
 in New York. hi Paris one sees many 
 faces sullen, scowling, and discontented — 
 men with old and new revolutions gleaming 
 in their fierce eyes. But the face of actual 
 and complete stolidity is to be found in 
 its best specimens in London. I wonder 
 whether that man with the pipe ever thinks 
 of anything ? When he goes home at night 
 after his day's work does he ever review
 
 The Strand i 2 
 
 o 
 
 life at all, and take into account how much 
 it is worth to him ? Or does the pipe supply 
 the place of all the futile thought and hope- 
 less self-scrutiny wherewith most others of 
 us mortals are wont to perplex ourselves 
 by way of recreation ? W^ould that man do 
 a noble action if it came in his way to do it, 
 or would he, under like conditions, commit 
 a crime ? I am almost inclined to think 
 that he could not do a noble action or 
 commit a crime, because nothing would be 
 a noble action or a crime to him. The 
 thing would not present itself to him in 
 that light. If he did a good deed it would 
 not be because he thought it good, or 
 thouoht about it at all ; if he committed a 
 crime it would only be as the machine at 
 the railway station gives out its packet of 
 butterscotch or its cigarette. I do not think 
 the study of that face makes one quite ex- 
 ultant about the blessings of civilisation in 
 London. It must be curious — if one could 
 get to the inside of it — the life of a man 
 who never reflects. We know what an
 
 I 24 Charing Cross to St. Paufs 
 
 inferior and q-ood-for-nothino- creature is the 
 man who never to himself has said that this, 
 whatever it might be, is his own, his native 
 land. But this man with the pipe probably 
 never said anything to himself about his 
 native land — it probably never came into his 
 mind that he had a native land, and he would 
 not have troubled himself to care about the 
 fact even if he recognised its existence. Has 
 he even a vaQ^ue dislike somehow and some- 
 where to the French or the Russians — or 
 the Irish, maybe ? — I hardly think so. I can 
 hardly believe he has reasoned himself far 
 enough to get up any such emotion. I have 
 sometimes been amused, when having to 
 wander about obscure parts of London, to 
 find how many people there are who do not 
 know the name of the street in which they 
 themselves are living. They have hired 
 their poor little lodging, and perhaps have 
 occupied the same lodging for a long time — 
 in many trades and quarters the populations 
 are not at all nomad — and they know where 
 their home is, and can find it every night
 
 i. 
 
 
 
 ■^ 
 
 
 1. m^^M^^^^^^MidmW'^ ■■.sim'^ 
 
 
 
 
 k^ r L 
 
 y 
 
 ST. MAUV-I.E-STRAND PROM THE EAST
 
 The Strand 1 2 7 
 
 without a mistake ; and what more should 
 they want to know about it ? What does 
 it matter to them by what name somebody 
 has chosen to call the street? It is their 
 street — the street in which they live — and 
 that is enough and to spare for them. I 
 am inclined to believe that this man with 
 the pipe never asked himself or any one else 
 the name of the street in which he lives. 
 
 Near Somerset House a man is crossing 
 the Strand. He wears a double eye-glass, 
 through which he is peering as he crosses, 
 apparently looking for some name or number 
 on a shop. He has a full beard and mous- 
 tache, and a handsome, well -moulded face. 
 He has left middle aoe a little behind — 
 he is making towards sixty — but there is a 
 freshness, there is an elasticity about him 
 which still carries with it a perfume and a 
 savour as of youth. I think he takes life 
 now pretty much as he finds it. He has 
 thought out most questions as far as he 
 could, and then at last come to the conclusion 
 that it would be better to let them think
 
 128 Charino Cross to St. Paiirs 
 
 themselves out without any trouble on his 
 part. He belongs to one of the artistic 
 professions, I am sure. I should be inclined 
 to set him down as a genial literary or 
 dramatic critic. He has written books and 
 plays in his time, and they were good in 
 their way, and had a certain sort of success ; 
 but they were not good enough for him. 
 He recognised the fact that he had not the 
 sacred fire of genius in him, and he did not 
 care for mere respectability in literature or 
 the drama. So he gave up creative work of 
 any kind, and took to journalism — to criticism, 
 and what are called " society leaders," and, 
 indeed, leaders on all manner of light and 
 bright subjects. He is really an admirable 
 critic, because he is intensely sympathetic. 
 He approaches every book or play he 
 criticises with a sincere desire to find some- 
 thing good in it. If he really cannot say 
 anything good of it he would much rather 
 say nothing at all about it. But when, as 
 in the case of a play, for example, he can- 
 not let it pass unnoticed, then he gives his
 
 OLD HOUSES IN HOLYWELL STREET 
 
 K
 
 The Strand i \ i 
 
 o 
 
 opinion, gently indeed, but very firmly ; and 
 those who know him, and who have not seen 
 the play, put the criticism down when they 
 have read it with the firm conviction that 
 that play will not hold the stage for long. 
 Pretensions of any kind make him angry, 
 and he hates to be sought out and done 
 homage to by certain authors and actors who 
 only court him because they want to get him 
 to notice them and to praise them. He 
 lives mainly in the Garrick Club, and he is a 
 great favourite there, as indeed he is where- 
 ever he is known. He is fond of talking 
 about Thackeray, whom he knew, and it 
 may be that some of the younger members 
 of the Club think he talks a little too much 
 about Thackeray, whom they did not know. 
 There is a story about his having been much 
 in love in his early — indeed, not very early — 
 days with a woman who first was of opinion 
 that she loved him, and then became of the 
 opinion that she loved somebody else, and 
 married that somebody accordingly. She 
 was not happy with the somebody, and the
 
 132 Charing Cross to St. PaiiFs 
 
 somebody died, after having led her a hard 
 Hfe for many years. Then most people 
 thought our friend the critic would marry 
 her, but he did not. Perhaps he thought he 
 could not trust his " fause true-love" any 
 more. Perhaps he had settled down to his 
 own free and comfortable bachelor life. 
 Perhaps he had grown out of all poetry and 
 sentiment : but that does not seem likely. 
 Anyhow, there he is, going off to the Garrick 
 very likely, and he will dine there, and go 
 from there and look in upon a theatre or two. 
 Later he will get back to the Garrick, and 
 will meet Mr. Irving there, and Mr. Bancroft, 
 and Mr. Beerbohm Tree, and Mr. Harry 
 Furniss, and that most polished of orators 
 and brightest of wits, Mr. David Plunket, and 
 "Joe" Knight and Comyns Carr, and ever 
 so many more delightful companions. 
 
 I have spoken of anecdotes about 
 Thackeray, and acknowledged the fact that 
 younger men sometimes think the subject 
 wellnigh exhausted. Still, with that know- 
 ledge full in my mind, let me tell a little
 
 The Strand i %% 
 
 v)J 
 
 anecdote of my own about Thackeray and 
 the Garrick Club. Many years ago I was 
 invited to chne at the Garrick by a man well 
 known about town in those days. He was a 
 man of some means, and " by way of being " 
 a literary man, and he had the reputation of 
 being somewhat of a snob in Thackeray's 
 sense of the word. That evening he began 
 talking to me about Thackeray, and saying, 
 as many people were fond of saying at the 
 time, that Thackeray was a more complete 
 snob than anybody pictured in his own book. 
 I knew little of Thackeray personally, but I 
 did not believe then, and I do not believe 
 now, the accusation of snobbery made 
 against him. So I disputed my friend's 
 assertion. Whereupon he proceeded to give 
 me evidence. "Why, in this very room," he 
 said, " Thackeray came to me yesterday and 
 offered me a cigar, and accompanied his offer 
 with the words, ' Yon ought to think highly 
 of that cigar, for it was given me by a noble 
 marquis.'" Yes, the story is perfectly true, 
 and my friend did not see in the least that
 
 134 Chainitg Cross to St. PaiiTs 
 
 Thackeray was chaffing him ; was perhaps a 
 little too open in his allusion to my friend's 
 supposed personal weakness — his too tender 
 devotion to the aristocracy of Great Britain. 
 My friend never knew, I venture to think, 
 why I smiled so much at his interesting 
 anecdote. There, I have told my Thackeray 
 story, and do not intend to tell any other. 
 "We don't talk of Nathaniel Hawthorne any 
 more," a literary man said to me not very 
 long ago in Boston. New men come up and 
 must have their turn. " Marry and amen," 
 as Browning would say. By the way, the 
 motto of some popular edition of Browning 
 might well be found in the passage to which 
 these words belong. They are, if I remem- 
 ber rightly, in the prelude to The Ring and 
 the Book. The poet has addressed the 
 British public, "Ye who love me not," and 
 then a little later on come the words, " Oh, 
 British public, who may love me yet — marry 
 and amen ! " The time has arrived ; the 
 British public does love him at last. 
 
 In my early London days there used to
 
 ST. CLEMENT DANES
 
 The Strand 137 
 
 be talk of a haunted house in — where does 
 the reader think ? — why, in Norfolk Street, 
 Strand. What an idea ! A ghost in that 
 prosaic region of the absolutely common- 
 place ! Yes, the ghost was talked about, 
 and it was said to be attached to a lodging- 
 house, which was falling into decay accord- 
 ingly. There was no Psychical Society in 
 those days, and no scientific and organised 
 attempt was made to find out all about the 
 ghost, though I think some amateur efforts 
 were made in that direction with the con- 
 sent of the proprietor of the establishment. 
 Nothing appears to have come of them, and 
 the story died away. May it not have been, 
 however, that if there ever was a ghost in 
 the house it was a ghost personally con- 
 ducted thither by one of the lodgers ? Men 
 of decayed family, when summoned to town 
 on business, often put up in one of those 
 Norfolk Street lodging-houses. As every- 
 body knows, there are family ghosts attached 
 to certain ancient houses, particularly Scottish 
 and Irish houses — ghosts of a nature like
 
 138 Charing Cross to St. Paii,rs 
 
 that of the dog who goes about with his 
 
 master, as well as ghosts of the nature of the 
 cat who abides by the f^imily hearth. Why 
 may not some ghost of the former order 
 have come up to London with the head of 
 the family and stayed in Norfolk Street, and 
 wandering inconsiderately about the passages 
 at midnight have scared some belated lodger, 
 and so set wild rumour alloat ? Then, of 
 course, when the head of the family called 
 for his bill, and had his trunks packed and 
 went away home, the attendant spectre would 
 go away home with him. I wonder what 
 would happen if two travellers brought two 
 ghosts with them ? Or suppose into some 
 house already haunted by its own ghost there 
 were to come a visitor with his family appa- 
 rition in his train ? Would there be a fight, 
 as Artemus Ward puts it in reference to his 
 probable meeting in the happy hunting- 
 erounds above with the red-skinned brother 
 who had robbed him down here on earth ? 
 Do ghosts speak to each other when they 
 meet ? Do they feel in this strange material
 
 The Strand 139 
 
 world as two Englishmen might do who met 
 in China, and assume that no ceremony of 
 introduction is needed between two kinsmen 
 ot race meeting in such an out-of-the-way 
 and foreign region ? 
 
 We are getting to the region of the Law 
 Courts. Positively I have to stop and pull 
 myself up, and think what that part of the 
 Strand was like before the Law Courts were 
 begun. Temple Bar, of course, one re- 
 collects ; and there was a queer little shop 
 kept by a barber and hairdresser, and there 
 was a passage, a sort of citl-de-sac, opening 
 out of the Strand somewhere about the spot 
 where the principal entrance to the Law 
 Courts is erected — and I think it was called 
 Pickett's Place — and I remember a sad story 
 connected with it. Sad ; yes, to be sure, 
 but very commonplace in its catastrophe, 
 although not perhaps in all its progress. It 
 is only the story of a young man in some- 
 what delicate health who came up to push 
 his way into London literature. He had 
 great gifts and he had a good start. He
 
 140 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 
 
 began to write for some of the best of the 
 magazines and for a daily newspaper. But 
 he turned one day into this dull little 
 Pickett's Place, and there he found his 
 fatality. Fate came to him in the shape of 
 a pretty, coquettish woman who kept a cigar 
 shop. He fell in love with her. She was 
 a married woman, but her husband had left 
 her. My young literary friend fell madly in 
 love with her. It was more like a case of 
 sheer insanity than any other love-madness 
 I have ever known. I have sometimes 
 thought of describing it in a novel, but it 
 would not do. Nobody would believe it. 
 That is the worst about the events of real 
 life : you cannot always venture to make use 
 of them in fiction, for the reader will say 
 they are too improbable to be even interest- 
 ing. It was not merely that my friend gave 
 up his whole heart to her — that anybody 
 might have done for a woman — but he gave 
 up his whole time to her. He spent his 
 every day in the little shop in Pickett's Place. 
 He dropped his club, he was never seen at
 
 The Strand 141 
 
 his once familiar haunts. He took her out 
 to dinner at some quiet tavern every evening. 
 The whole day long he sat in that shop 
 talking to her. He neglected his work, gave 
 up his engagement on the daily paper ; did 
 nothinof but hangf after the skirts of this 
 pretty, saucy young woman. I often used to 
 wonder how he did not feel ashamed of being 
 seen all day long in that cigar shop by every 
 one who chose to go in. His friends soon 
 came to know that if they wanted to see him 
 they must go to the shop in Pickett's Place. 
 He ceased to write to his people at home ; 
 when they wanted to know anything about 
 him they wrote to me, and I softened things 
 as well as I could. At last I recommended 
 that the young man's mother should come to 
 town and talk to him. She did come, and 
 they had some sad scenes. Nothing could be 
 done. He told his mother that he could not 
 live without this woman's love, and that he 
 meant to hold on to her in the hope that her 
 husband might drink himself to death, and in 
 that event he was determined to marry her.
 
 142 Charing Cross to St. PaitTs 
 
 He told his mother that there was nothing 
 wrong between them, which I firmly believe, 
 for the little cigar-woman was determined to 
 marry him, and I felt no doubt that she 
 would maintain a rigid propriety in their 
 relationship. I went to her once as a private 
 ambassador from the family, to ask her 
 whether she was not prepared to take what 
 Mr. Labouchere once called "a financial view 
 of the matter." She laughed at the proposi- 
 tion. vShe was not prepared to take a financial 
 view — that financial view — of the matter. 
 She was determined to marry the young man, 
 and then everything would be hers, she said. 
 So I dropped out of the business, and only 
 saw my infatuated friend from time to time. 
 He gave up his whole life to this woman — 
 his life, his family, his prospects, his literary 
 career, his intellect, his education, his mind, 
 his heart, his better nature, his very soul, to 
 this brainless and unfeeling little creature. 
 At last the husband did "dree his weird," 
 did drink himself to death, and my Antony 
 was married to his Pickett's Place Cleopatra.
 
 The Strand 143 
 
 Then the wife's one grand calculation proved 
 a complete miscalculation. She had relied 
 on the love of the father and mother for their 
 son, and she felt sure that when once the 
 thing was done they would take him back, 
 and take her with him. They did nothing 
 of the kind ; they could not be induced to 
 take him back. They forgave him, they 
 said ; but that was all, and one cannot live 
 on forgiveness. They did not withdraw the 
 little allowance they used to make him, but 
 it was only a very little allowance. It would 
 have kept a young bachelor well enough in 
 London while he was making a career for 
 himself; but it was nothing for a man with a 
 wife who, in the very cigar shop itself, had 
 acquired expensive tastes, and could under- 
 stand no affection which did not frequently 
 express itself in champagne. So they 
 dragged on together, he still loving her in a 
 sickly maniacal sort of way. She got cham- 
 pagne — sometimes from him when he had 
 the money, sometimes from others. But she 
 got the champagne, and she began to wear
 
 144 Charing Cross to St. PanVs 
 
 costly ornaments. Then he grew jealous, 
 and she told him that she didn't care. A 
 man had no right to marry, she told him 
 bluntly, unless he had the means of keeping 
 a wife according to her tastes. His people 
 had deceived her, she said — they had taken 
 her in ; she never would have married him if 
 she had known what horrid and hard-hearted 
 people they were. But she meant to amuse 
 herself in life, she declared ; she had had 
 enough of sentimentality. 
 
 "Did you never love me.'*" he asked, 
 piteously. " Oh, love ! — botheration ! " was 
 her encouraging reply, and then, further to 
 relieve her feelings, she mentioned that she 
 thought she was marrying a gentleman, and 
 found she had married only a consumptive 
 pauper. Even then he had not the courage 
 to do anything ; he told himself that he could 
 not live without her. Very likely he could 
 not. But he soon found that he certainly 
 could not live with her. She deceived him 
 for a time, then frankly ceased to deceive 
 him, for she took no trouble to conceal any-
 
 The Strand 145 
 
 thing from him. He died of consumption 
 not long after, poor fellow ! and his true 
 friends were all glad that he had been set 
 free. I had written a strong appeal to his 
 father and mother, and with the dread of his 
 death their anger melted away, and the 
 mother wrote to say that they were both 
 coming up to town to be near him. The 
 letter came when I was standing beside his 
 dead body in the presence of his wife. She 
 took the letter and opened it. Her words 
 summed up the situation. "Oh, bother!" 
 she exclaimed ; " what's the good of that 
 now ? ' 
 
 Here was a little Marble Heart tragedy 
 in Pickett's Place, off the Strand. I do not 
 know what became of the Marble Heart. I 
 never heard anything of the woman since. 
 I never knew, in all my acquaintanceships, 
 any instance of a promising, manly, generous 
 life being so utterly and completely spoiled 
 by an ignorant, selfish, and stupid little 
 woman. Apart from all considerations cf 
 public improvement, I am glad that Pickett's 
 
 L
 
 146 Charing Cross to St. Paufs 
 
 Place has gone. I am glad that it has gone, 
 merely because I associated it always with 
 her and with my unhappy friend. I am glad 
 that it is gone, and the traffic of the Law 
 Courts tramps every day over its all-but- 
 forgotten grave.
 
 V 
 
 THE LAW COURTS 
 
 We are in the region of the Law Courts. 
 The Law Courts have created here a resfion 
 of their own — all their own. It is as when 
 an army suddenly encamps in the close 
 neighbourhood of some decaying old town — 
 a new population, a new traffic, a new life 
 quickly spring up about it like new vegeta- 
 tion. Mr. Pennell has made this very real 
 for us in his sketches. He brines out with 
 some vivid touches the character and colour 
 of that new life which the Law Courts have 
 created. We are standing in front of the 
 entrances to the courts. Looking eastward 
 we can see the matchless proportions of the 
 mystical Griffin, and farther on the tower
 
 148 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 
 
 of St. Dunstan's. The tracery of the tower 
 comes exquisitely out, and if one fixes his 
 eyes on it and disdains for a moment the 
 lower level of life, he might fancy himself 
 back in some mediaeval Nuremberg. People 
 in general do not know how London can be 
 glorified, etherealised, mysticised, utterly trans- 
 figured by looking from beneath up to its roofs 
 and chimneys and gables. As we look at the 
 tower of St. Dunstan's now we are easily 
 lifted from the real into the ideal. St. 
 Dunstan has long since lost his giants — so 
 long since that many of the present genera- 
 tion of Londoners do not even know that 
 St. Dunstan ever had giants to lose. " Be- 
 fore St. Mark still glow his steeds of brass," 
 but before St. Dunstan no longer stand his 
 Gog and Magog. 
 
 Come down, however, from St. Dunstan's 
 and the clouds. Return to the Law Courts. 
 " I mind the bigging o't," as poor Edie 
 Ochiltree says in The Antiquary. I used 
 to go to a newspaper office in the City a 
 good deal about the time when the Courts
 
 T/ic Law Coitiis 149 
 
 were being built, and I took an interest in 
 their progress, partly because of the long 
 controversies in the House of Commons 
 which had preluded the scheme for their 
 erection — controversies as to site and 
 structure and what not, which divided Par- 
 liament into hostile camps on the building 
 question, as it had been divided years before 
 on what I may perhaps call the constitution 
 of South Kensintrton. The buildinof of the 
 Law Courts was destined to be the occasion 
 of a different kind of controversy also, for 
 there was a dispute with the workmen, and 
 there was a strike, and there was the importa- 
 tion of foreign workmen to finish the build- 
 ings, and at one time the prophets of evil 
 shook their heads and said the scheme had 
 been unlucky from first to last, and the build- 
 ings would never be finished at all. The 
 controversy, however, got settled somehow 
 ^that controversy ; the Law Courts were 
 built and opened. I remember the day well. 
 The Queen \\\ person presided over the 
 ceremonial in the long narrow central hall.
 
 150 Charing Cross to St. Paul' s 
 
 It really was a magnificent pageant. I am 
 not very fond of public ceremonials as a rule, 
 but this was a noble sight. The order of 
 the day was for men to wear either uniforms 
 or Court dresses, except as regarded the Bar, 
 of which the members wore the garb of their 
 profession and its rank. No one was allowed 
 to enter in ordinary, morning dress — the 
 few men who were not barristers and were 
 not entitled to wear Court dress had to come 
 in evening costume. Of course all the ladies 
 were in full eveninsf dress. I wonder if I 
 may digress for a moment to mention a 
 definition of the right to wear Court dress 
 which was laid down for me once by lips that 
 seemed to breathe forth authority ^. It was 
 at a great dinner in the City — a feast given in 
 honour of an eminent statesman and diplo- 
 matist. The cards of invitation prescribed 
 that the guests were to come in uniform 
 or Court dress. Nevertheless, there were 
 several at the tables in ordinary evening 
 garb. I got into talk with my next neigh- 
 bour, who was evidently a civic dignitary
 
 "iJ^'ffcHT^S^ '1^' 'h^' '"'^ ''i "' V '"'1, 
 
 THE CORNER OF ESSEX STREET'
 
 The Law Courts 1 5 -> 
 
 3 
 
 of high rank, and we spoke on the subject 
 of Court costume. I asked him how it 
 happened that some gentlemen were allowed 
 to come in ordinary evening dress. The 
 truth is, I was smarting under a sense of 
 wrong, for I had put myself into an anti- 
 quated Court suit which I had worn at a 
 Speaker's dinner more than ten years before, 
 and I had thus clad myself because I was 
 under the impression that I should not be 
 allowed in if I came in ordinary evening 
 wear. My instructor said there had to be 
 allowance made for gentlemen who, whatever 
 their personal merits, were not entitled to 
 put on Court dress. This opened anew field 
 of inquiry to me, on which my friend was 
 very willing to give me information. He 
 explained to me all the various positions, dig- 
 nities, offices, functions, acts and deeds, and 
 so on, which entitled a man to put on Court 
 costume. But I urged that surely a man 
 who had not held any of these offices, or 
 done any of these things, or gone through 
 any of these presentation ceremonials, might
 
 1 54 Charing Cross to St. Pajifs 
 
 nevertheless put on Court dress if he liked. 
 My instructor settled the question at once, 
 with dignity and even severity. " He might, 
 sir," he said, "but it would be for him only 
 fancy dress ! " I questioned no more that 
 day. 
 
 It was really a great ceremonial. One 
 odd little incident of it made a fantastic 
 impression on me. It was in the earliest 
 days of December 1882. The late Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury had just died — was not 
 yet buried. The ordinary spectators were 
 arrayed along either side of the great hall, 
 and there was kept open a wide space in the 
 middle — a path by which the Queen and the 
 Royal princes and princesses, and the great 
 dignitaries of Church and State, were to pass 
 to the places reserved for them. Suddenly 
 there was borne along what seemed to be a 
 sort of bier with a recumbent and deathlike 
 figure in it. A shudder passed through some 
 of those who stood near me, and some one in 
 a loud whisper hazarded the explanation that, 
 for some ancient reason or usage, it was held
 
 The Law Courts 155 
 
 becoming that on such an occasion the last 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as his 
 living successor, should be present. This, 
 however, was not the true explanation. The 
 true explanation was simple. One of the 
 oldest of the judges was in such a condition 
 of health that he could neither walk nor 
 stand. He was unwilling, however, to 
 remain away from the ceremonial, and he 
 had himself thus borne into the hall. His 
 pallid face and closed eyes, as he was carried 
 past, gave some ground for the startling 
 theory that we were looking on the bier of 
 the dead Archbishop. 
 
 When the pageantry was over, and the 
 Royal visitors had gone, the doors of the hall 
 were thrown open for the general public, and 
 the general public came in with a very ugly 
 rush indeed. I have seen some crowding in 
 my time, but I have seldom seen anything 
 more formidable for the moment than that 
 sudden meeting between the vast throng 
 struggling to get in, and those who were still 
 left in the hall struggling to get out. I was
 
 156 Charing Cross to St. PaiiFs 
 
 one of those who had remained in the hall, 
 not knowing that the doors were to be thus 
 suddenly thrown open ; and I found myself, 
 with my daughter, all at once in the thick of 
 that terrible crowd. We were swept some- 
 how out of the hall and on to the pavement. 
 A few mounted police were striving to keep 
 back some of the crowd, but the rush w^as 
 too impetuous, and the force behind the 
 nearest wave too great, to allow of any 
 effectual restraint. I feared for a moment 
 that the ill-luck of the Law Courts was about 
 to be proved in a very ghastly way, and that 
 lives would be lost in that terrible struQ-Me. 
 One poor girl — a nicely -dressed creature 
 apparently of the sempstress class — fell down 
 in a faint not far from where I was battlinof 
 my way, and some men and women tumbled 
 right over her ; but they were up again in a 
 moment, and they were trying to lift her — 
 the very worst thing they could have done 
 for her — when some police forced their way 
 in and cleared a little space round the girl, 
 and a kindly woman composed her arms and
 
 The Lazo Courts i 5 7 
 
 legs, and after a little she sighed and shivered 
 and cried, and then came to all right again. 
 Poor cirl ! the woman who attended her 
 opened her firmly -clasped hand and found 
 in it two sixpences — her little stock of 
 funds, no doubt, for the day's holiday, and 
 which even in her swoon she clutched firmly. 
 After all there was no particular harm clone 
 to anybody so far as I could make out, but 
 the danger for the moment was very genuine, 
 and the horror of the situation remains clear 
 in my memory. Nothing seems to me more 
 pathetic and pitiful in its way than the 
 half-crazy eagerness of the poorer class of 
 Londoners to see any manner of sight. 
 They will fight, struggle, rush, risk their lives, 
 to see anything. Mothers will carry their 
 little babies into the thick of the roughest 
 crowd on the chance of having a glimpse 
 at anything out of the common. Men and 
 women will wait for hours in cold and rain 
 to see a carriage drive by with some Royal 
 personage in it. They will tramp for miles 
 beside a handful of soldiers marching. The
 
 158 Charing Cross to St. Paitrs 
 
 utter bareness and barrenness of their 
 ordinary lives makes any novelty welcome to 
 them. What did these men and women 
 expect to see in the Law Courts that day ? 
 All the Royal visitors had been carefully got 
 out of the way before the doors were thrown 
 open. Nothing was to be seen but a long, 
 narrow hall. Such a crowd would not care 
 much about the hall's architectural merits. 
 The hall could be seen the very next day by 
 anybody. But there was the temptation — 
 something, anything, to be seen at once — at 
 once ; and so they risked their limbs and their 
 lives in the one mad overpowering desire to 
 have a sight of it. 
 
 Two of the bravest and the coolest men I 
 know or have ever known have alike told 
 me that the one thing they most dread is the 
 rush of a great crowd. Even a friendly 
 crowd, I was told by each man, had a terror 
 for him. I know a very plucky girl — and 
 there are many girls a great deal pluckier 
 than most men — who told me she never 
 knew what fear was until she got involved in
 
 The Laiv Courts 159 
 
 a great crowd at an election. It was a 
 friendly crowd and a good-humoured crowd 
 — would not willingly have hurt a hair of her 
 head — but It was a crowd, and she was 
 helpless to get out of it, and it was helpless 
 to let her out, and she was painfully 
 squeezed, and she saw nothing but the dense 
 mass of coats and shawls and faces, and she 
 felt as if she must faint, and asked herself 
 what would happen to her if she fainted, and 
 the crowd was eagerly rushing on and she 
 was swept along with it ; "and if I faint and 
 fall," she thought, "they must rush over me 
 and must trample me to death." I have 
 seen her on the deck of a Levantine 
 steamer in a white squall off Cape Matapan, 
 and she showed no more fear than if she 
 were at home in her drawing-room ; but the 
 election crowd was too much for her nerves, 
 and she gave way to an utter terror. 
 
 I must say that I think a London crowd 
 is almost always a good-natured crowd. 
 Lately I passed through a London crowd 
 which all the time I saw it was on a broad
 
 i6o Charlno- Cross to St. Pcutfs 
 
 grin. There was a great function going on 
 in the City, and a procession of carriages 
 was driving along the Strand and Fleet 
 Street. At either side and all alono- the 
 route a dense wall of men and women, girls 
 and boys, was set up. Every face was en- 
 livened by the same broad grin. What was 
 the source of the mirth } I could not cjuess 
 — I have not the least idea. What did they 
 see ? Merely a string of carriages, with men 
 and women in evening dress seated therein. 
 No doubt some of us were ridiculous objects 
 enough — that I readily admit. But we can- 
 not all have been ridiculous. That pretty 
 girl, now, so becomingly dressed, with the 
 tall, handsome, soldierly- looking man, her 
 father doubtless — what is there to lau^h at 
 in her, or in him, or in both together ? Yet 
 the grin was as broad while they were pass- 
 ing by as if they had been a pair of figures 
 out of a Punch and Judy show. The mirth 
 was not that of derision ; it had nothing- 
 savage, nothing bitterly scornful about it. 
 It was simply the expression of honest,
 
 E- 
 
 o 
 o 
 u 
 
 ►J 
 
 a 
 s 
 t- 
 
 M
 
 The Laiv Courts 16 
 
 o 
 
 irrepressible amusement. For some reason 
 
 or other we were all of us too much for that 
 
 crowd — we were simply too ridiculous, and 
 
 the crowd could not help itself — it must 
 
 needs grin. It was trying, I confess, to be 
 
 thus regarded as the laughing-stock of a 
 
 good-natured crowd, which evidently did not 
 
 want to offend or annoy us, but could not 
 
 possibly keep from laughing at us. It was 
 
 trying to have to pass slowly along through 
 
 a mile or so of a throng every face in which 
 
 was distended by this one unceasing and 
 
 unchanging smile at us. Let us hope the 
 
 ordeal may have done some of us good — 
 
 may have helped to take the conceit out 
 
 of us. It is not thus we are usually fond 
 
 enough to regarci ourselves — not as mere 
 
 objects of the laughter of a crowd of our 
 
 fellow -mortals. There can hardly be the 
 
 self-conceit in man or woman which would 
 
 not have some of the starch taken out of it 
 
 by that promenade between those two lines 
 
 of grinning faces, Mr. Pennell has drawn a 
 
 flower-girl in one of these sketches. She is
 
 164 Charing Cross to St. PaiiTs 
 
 to be seen near the entrance to the Law 
 Courts, She is a sonsie girl, with a broad 
 month and a great smile : " Does she call all 
 that a smile?" — I think I am quoting the 
 words of some popular burlesque. It is a 
 big smile, certainly, and I am sure that smile 
 must have smiled ai me, not on me, the day 
 I had to face that singular ordeal. Well, 
 she is a pleasant-looking girl, and I owe her 
 no ill-will, even though she did honestly 
 think me and my companions ridiculous 
 creatures, and did frankly acknowledge the 
 conviction by the distortion of her expressive 
 countenance. 
 
 Observe the different types of lawyer 
 which Mr. Pennell is able to show us. See 
 that lawyer with the clean-shaven face ; see 
 that other with the moustache and beard 
 and eye-glass. These are two contrasting 
 types. The clean-shaven lawyer has his 
 very soul in his profession. He has not a 
 thought beyond it — he would not allow 
 himself to have a thought beyond it, even 
 if he could. He never reads anything but
 
 The Law Courts 165 
 
 briefs and law reports. He never talks of 
 any thine;' but cases and verdicts and judg- 
 ments. He has never been known to laugh 
 at anything but one of his own jokes — of 
 course in court — or any joke delivered 
 by a judge. Elia says of himself that if 
 the sun were some day to take to rising in 
 the west and pursuing a steady course east- 
 ward, he, Elia, would never notice anything 
 unusual in the reversed progress. Neither 
 would our close-shaven lawyer, unless some 
 one were to invite his attention to the pheno- 
 menon, and even then he would not trouble 
 his mind long about it. Why should he ? 
 It would have no particular bearing on the 
 case of Box versus Cox or Patter versus 
 Clatter. How hard he works, our clean- 
 shaven lawyer! He has a pull at his briefs 
 late at night — last thing at night — and he 
 is up early in the morning, and the moment 
 he is cleanly shaven he goes at them again. 
 I have seen him in a drawing-room after a 
 dinner-party creep to a sofa and settle clown 
 there, and rest his head on the arm of the
 
 1 66 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 
 
 sofa and have a quiet little sleep — all from 
 sheer physical exhaustion. Then in a few 
 minutes he is awake and alert aofain. Now 
 look at our other friend, the lawyer with the 
 moustache and the beard and the eye-glass. 
 He is an able man in his professional way 
 too, but he does not surrender life absolutely 
 to law and the Law Courts. Not he, indeed. 
 Why, you can see by the first glance at him 
 that he is a leading man in his Volunteer 
 corps, that he is fond of rifle-shooting, that 
 he likes to knock about the billiard-balls. 
 You can see him on his horse in the Row 
 every morning, and you may come upon 
 him on a Sunday evening at Hurlingham, 
 and there is seldom a first night of any 
 importance in a London West- End theatre 
 when he is not to be seen in one of the 
 stalls. He enjoys life — he enjoys even his 
 law cases ; he is in good spirits about them ; 
 he takes them as a game, as an amusement, 
 rather than as a duty and a business. But 
 he never talks about them at a dinner-party 
 — he will talk of anything else rather. Will
 
 The Laiv Courts 167 
 
 he get on in his profession ? Oh yes, he is 
 getting on in his profession. There is no 
 reason why he should not run his clean- 
 shaven rival hard in the race. There are 
 different ways of doing the same sort of 
 work — of reaching the same end, that is 
 all. Prince Hal takes to the battle in one 
 spirit, Harry Hotspur in another. By the 
 way, in Shakespeare's rendering it is Prince 
 Hal who carries the day. 
 
 I admire the exterior of the Law Courts. 
 I am told I oucrht not to do so, and that it 
 is not the right thing to admire any part 
 of the structure, outside or inside. But I 
 cannot help myself — I cannot get over my 
 invincible ignorance, and I stop every now 
 and then in front of the Courts and look 
 on them with admiration. I also admire 
 the long, narrow hall. But my admiration 
 comes to a stop there. Anything meaner, 
 more uncomfortable, more ugly than the 
 various little courts themselves, was never 
 put together by the perverted ingenuity of 
 man. It would be hard to exacro-erate the
 
 1 68 CJiariug Cross to St. PauFs 
 
 utterly paradoxical character of these re- 
 markable courts. They are too small ; they 
 are too large ; they are too dark ; they are 
 too glaring ; they are too hot ; they are too 
 cold ; it is impossible to hear what a witness 
 is saying, and yet each court is like a 
 whispering gallery to send along the 
 muttered gossip of some idle spectator. 
 The draughts that howl through these 
 rooms make one fancy he is in the Cave 
 of yEolus. The great curtains which are 
 hung at the doors are so arranged that they 
 involve the hapless stranger trying to enter 
 as if he were beinof rolled in a huo-e blanket. 
 If you are seated securely in the court it is 
 interestino; to watch the struo^ales of this 
 hapless stranger. You see his form bulging 
 here and there through the thick drapery 
 in which he has ignorantly invested himself 
 He thouQ-ht he had nothino^ to do but to 
 draw the curtain aside and go in : he did 
 draw the curtain aside, but it took him into 
 its folds and rolled itself round and round 
 him, and look how he is struQorlinor ricrht-
 
 The Law Courts \ 69 
 
 fully to be free ! He plunges this way, 
 and the curtain plunges with him ; that 
 way, and the curtain takes a new twist 
 about him. At last he emerges, wrathful, 
 shameful, his face red and glowing, and his 
 hat — his poor hat, which he has had to carry 
 in his hand through the thick of the fight ! 
 He knows that his face is dirty as well as 
 red, for the curtain has clung to his be- 
 wildered countenance, and he is not without 
 a fear that my Lord on the bench may have 
 seen him, and may hav^e thought he was 
 doing it all for the fun of the thing, and 
 perhaps may commit him for contempt of 
 court. Contempt of court indeed ! Who 
 is there that could avoid feeling a contempt 
 for that court ? I speak, needless to say, 
 of the chamber, not of the judges who are 
 compelled to sit in it or the majesty of the 
 law which they represent. I have heard 
 judges themselves express over and over 
 again their utter contempt for that court, 
 even while they were sitting in it and 
 administering justice. Indeed, the ex-
 
 1 70 Charing Cross to St. PaiiT s 
 
 pression of their contempt was in itself an 
 administration of justice. 
 
 I made an interesting acquaintance once 
 in the precincts of these Law Courts. I 
 made the acquaintance of a young barmaid. 
 "Ye smile; I see ye, ye profane ones," as 
 Byron says. She was occupied at one of 
 the refreshment stalls near to a court which 
 I used to have to attend. She was once 
 a little distressed at the attentions of two 
 young men somewhat of the 'Arry class. 
 There was no one else there except myself, 
 and she gave a pleading side-glance at me 
 which told me beyond mistake or doubt 
 that she wished me, and my graver and 
 elder presence, to remain there until the 
 'Arries had taken their drink and gone 
 their way. They did not mean to be 
 rude, and they were not really rude in any 
 offensive way, but they were chaffing each 
 other about sweethearts, and then they 
 began to ask her about her sweethearts, 
 and she did not like it. They went away 
 soon, and then she talked to me in the
 
 ENTRANCE TO THE COURTS
 
 The Law Courts 173 
 
 frankest and most pleasant way. She was 
 well-mannered and modest, and her talk 
 was interesting. She told me she hardly 
 ever met with any rudeness of any kind, but 
 that she did not like being chaffed, and 
 she was a little afraid of the two 'Arries. 
 She did not know much about the business 
 of the courts. She asked me if I was con- 
 cerned in a case, and I said I was ; and 
 she asked me if it was somethino- about 
 property, and I said no — that it was not a 
 civil matter at all — that it was a trial in a 
 criminal court. She asked me if I was 
 prosecuting some one, and I said no — some 
 one was prosecuting me, which was per- 
 fectly true, for I was " had up " as a criminal 
 conspirator. She was greatly puzzled, and 
 evidently did not know how to reconcile 
 my position with the favourable opinion 
 she had allowed herself to form of me. I 
 could see, however, that she was too 
 good-hearted to permit any serious suspicion 
 to invade her, and that she took it for 
 granted there must be some reputable
 
 I 74 C/ian'no Cross to Si. Pants 
 
 explanation. I did not see her ac^ain for 
 months. My next appearance in court 
 was, as Mr. Micawber puts it, "in the 
 capacity of defendant in Civil process." 1 
 went to the refreshment stall arain and 
 saw my friend. She was pleased to see 
 me, and asked how I had got on in my 
 former case, and I told her I had got off, 
 which again a little puzzled her, and that 
 this time I was only mixed up in a civil 
 case. She wished me luck in that too, 
 and I thanked her and felt thankful. She 
 asked me if I had just come to town, and 
 whether the weather was fine in my part 
 of the country. She was naturally under 
 the impression that I only came up to town 
 every now and then to bear a part in some 
 law case. We had some pleasant talk 
 together, and I left her with a kindly feel- 
 ing, regarding her as a friendly, fresh, 
 intelligent, and lady -like girl. She has for 
 me another interest, too, in the fact that 
 she is the only barmaid with whom, so far 
 as I can remember, I ever exchanged a
 
 I'/ic Laiv Courts 175 
 
 single word that did not belong strictly to 
 the business of my demand and her supply. 
 1 do not believe that I ever before got 
 even so far into conversation with a young 
 lady at a refreshment counter as to hazard 
 a remark on the fairness or the foulness of 
 the weather. 
 
 In front of the Griffin the traffic gets all 
 crowded together. A policeman stands 
 dionified and motionless in the midst ot it — 
 a grand sight. Nothing disturbs him. The 
 waves seem to beat on him in vain. He 
 stands like the Eddystone Lighthouse in a 
 storm. He seems, however, to be, unlike 
 the Eddystone, somewhat conscious of the 
 dignity of his position and his demeanour. 
 How, indeed, could he possibly be uncon- 
 scious of the one and the other ? He can 
 stop all that movement of traffic with a wave 
 of his majestic hand. He could say to that 
 stream of omnibuses, "Thus far, and no 
 farther — for the moment — until I bid you go 
 forward again." He can give pause to that 
 swift-darting hansom, whose occupant, cran-
 
 I 76 Charing Cross to St. Paul' s 
 
 ing over the doors with eager, impatient gaze, 
 is evidently bent on trying to catch some 
 train. But, no — whether he catch the train 
 or miss it, there must his cab stand motion- 
 less until the steadfast policeman sets it free 
 to go its way. Even that stately carriage, 
 with the splendid footmen and the two 
 elegantly -dressed ladies who recline on its 
 cushions — even that must stand when he 
 commands. He is not without respect and 
 even reverence, in a way, for carriages and 
 their owners, but when duty has to be done 
 he can be as severe with a coroneted 
 barouche as with a donkey-cart. I always 
 think that the traffic-directing policeman in 
 the middle of the roadway has one distinct 
 advantage over the policeman promenading 
 along the footpath in the fact that he is not 
 asked many questions. One could not stop 
 in the midway of that torrent of traffic to ask 
 the policeman anything. But the officer on 
 the sidewalk, how he is beset with questions ! 
 You see him in Mr. Pennell's sketches just 
 as you may see him every day in real life,
 
 « 
 
 O 
 
 U 
 
 X 
 
 o 
 
 u 
 o 
 ►J 
 u 
 
 w 
 « 
 
 N
 
 The Lazv Courts 179 
 
 with his head bent down to catch the purport 
 of some Httle woman's interrogatory. It 
 must be trying to be stopped in the middle 
 of Fleet Street and invited to point out the 
 shortest way to Shepherd's Bush, or Long- 
 ridge Road, South Kensington, or how to 
 get to the School of Cookery. But I never 
 saw a policeman look impatient or heard of 
 his oivino- other than a civil answer. His 
 resources of memory and self-possession 
 never fail him. When anybody stops me in 
 the street and suddenly asks me the way to 
 any place, I instantly lose my head and for- 
 get where the place is, or how to get to it, 
 even though it should happen to be in some 
 spot quite close to my own abode. 
 
 Let us go back into the Law Courts and 
 enter any one of them. It is marvellous the 
 manner in which, by mere listening, one can 
 bring himself to take an interest in anything. 
 Here is a claim for damages being heard. 
 A man has been knocked down by an 
 omnibus — he was not very severely hurt, 
 and there is nothing at all of the tragical
 
 i8o Charing Cross to St. Paul' s 
 
 about his story. But he was put out of 
 work for a time and had to pay a doctor, and 
 so he makes his claim ; and the omnibus 
 company dispute it, and insist that it was all 
 his own fault and his own carelessness, and 
 the learned counsel on both sides fight the 
 quarrel out. You listen and you become 
 strangely interested. Gradually you grow 
 to be quite a partisan — of the omnibus, or 
 the man, as the case may be. You think 
 the little jokes of the counsel are quite 
 refreshing, and as for the judge, when he 
 condescends to be merry with one of the 
 witnesses, you find yourself breaking into a 
 peal of laughter. Next day you look out in 
 the papers for a report of the case, and are 
 very much disappointed when you find it 
 compressed into about six lines, which six 
 lines are published, it would seem, mainly 
 for the purpose of giving the names of the 
 learned counsel. Then one begins to under- 
 stand why it is that courts of law have their 
 regular attendants, who resort there not 
 because of some particular case in which
 
 The Laiu Courts i8i 
 
 they feel an interest, but simply because the 
 courts are open and something is going on. 
 I have noticed that some people come 
 regularly to the same court day after day, 
 bringing a packet of sandwiches with them, 
 which they consume at the regular luncheon- 
 time, remaining in the court while all others 
 have gone out, and while I am eating some- 
 thing at the refreshment-bar and talking to 
 my one and only friend there. How do 
 they live, these people who come day after 
 day to the courts ? They cannot all be 
 persons of property — none of them look 
 quite like that — and how and when do they 
 work for their living ? What can the 
 occupations be which allow men to devote 
 the greater part of the day to the unprofitable 
 pastime of attending the sittings of a law 
 court '^. They cannot all be printers on the 
 staff of a morning paper ; they do not look 
 like actors ; they cannot all belong to my line 
 of life and do literary work at night; and 
 there they are day after day, day after day ! 
 They are of kin, apparently, with the poorly-
 
 1 82 Charing Ci^oss to St. Paul's 
 
 dressed men who sit in St. James's Park for 
 hours daily. I suppose the men and women 
 who attend the courts get to feel as if they 
 were acquaintances of the officials, and of the 
 counsel, and even of the judges. They do, 
 I know, sometimes pick up an acquaintance 
 which may ripen into something like friend- 
 ship with certain of the policemen and the 
 ushers. One can fancy some such regular 
 visitor at the courts sitting in St. James's 
 Park one day during the long vacation with 
 his little boy or girl, and seeing a dignified- 
 looking person pass by who graciously 
 salutes him with a nod of the head. " Who 
 is that gentleman, papa .'^ " "That gentle- 
 man, my dear, is Mr. Wafer, usher in the 
 Lord Chief Justice's court ; he is a very 
 particular friend of mine." How proud that 
 child feels of that parent ! How proud that 
 parent feels of himself! It would be worth 
 sitting in court for months of the dullest 
 cases to win at the end the triumph of such 
 a moment ! We can all bring it home to 
 ourselves easily enough. You are walking
 
 The Law Courts 183 
 
 in llydc Park on a Sunday with your ad- 
 miring niece from the country. Some one 
 salutes you graciously. " Uncle, who is that 
 gentleman '^ " " That, my dear, is the Lord 
 Chief Justice " — or Lord Wolseley, as the 
 case may be. Then we do, indeed, feel that 
 life is worth living, and that we in particular 
 have not lived in vain. The one touch of 
 nature makes the whole world kin.
 
 VI 
 
 FLEET STREET 
 
 From the new realms of the Law Courts we 
 get into the ancient region of the newspapers. 
 It is ancient, of course, only in a sense. It 
 was not particularly noted as a newspaper 
 region about the time when Dr. Johnson 
 invited Boswell to take that famous walk 
 down Fleet Street. But it seems ancient to 
 us now, and Fleet Street is as much the 
 accepted and typical region of the newspaper 
 and the newspaper man as the Latin Quarter 
 was once, and even to some extent still is, 
 the recognised home of the Bohemian 
 student. Mr, Pennell gives us some well- 
 chosen glimpses of this region. Look at 
 the two opposite corners of that little lane
 
 
 
 
 FLEET STREET
 
 Fleet Street 187 
 
 which opens out from Fleet Street : one 
 corner occupied by the Punch office, the 
 other by the office of the World. One 
 cannot now imagine a London without 
 Punch. It seems curious to think that 
 such a pubHcation should ever have been 
 called the London Charivari; so little of 
 the Charivari is, or ever was, about 
 thoroughly English Mr. Punch. Never from 
 first to last was there a flavour of anything 
 that was not thoroughly British about Mr. 
 Punch : his prejudices — and what prejudices 
 he did show now and again ! — were 
 thoroughly English. But how healthy, pure, 
 and manly his humour always ! A Paris 
 comic paper makes its stock-in-trade of one 
 subject only — illicit love. Mr. Punch never 
 saw any tun in the fact that a husband was 
 deceiving his fond wife, or that a wife was 
 carrying on an intrigue with her credulous 
 husband's closest friend. Mr. Punch could 
 have been as droll about this as any French- 
 man of them all if he saw any fun or drollery 
 in it ; but, bless his honest, manly heart ! he
 
 1 88 Charing Cross to St. PauTs 
 
 did not, and we are all greatly obliged to him 
 for it, Mr. Punch started as a rather ex- 
 treme Radical in the days of Douglas Jerrold 
 and Tom Hood and Thackeray. He went 
 in a good deal for the " man-and-a-brother " 
 principle ; he was much in sympathy with the 
 pj^oUtaire. One of his many ephemeral rivals 
 satirised him, I remember, by publishing the 
 titles of various poems humorously alleged to 
 have appeared in the pages of Punch — 
 " Sit down by me, my shoeless brother " ; 
 "Come, share my lodging, honest tramp," 
 and such like ; but Mr. Punch soon got out 
 of that humour, and no one could think of 
 satirising him after that fashion now. But 
 the praise that I have given Punch no 
 enemy could deny him. During all his long 
 reign he has had genius and art to help him, 
 and he has had purity too. See what a crowd 
 is peering into his windows, where you be- 
 hold the pages of far- back numbers displayed, 
 and may study a caricature of " Pam," or of 
 " Dizzy," or even of Brougham and O'Connell. 
 Some of the cartoons must surely be a rare
 
 A 
 
 
 i7^ 
 
 
 'r"r; 
 
 'i i^>K.,Siiilii? 
 
 
 
 ■tfc;' 
 
 
 t->%«siss 
 
 ST. dunstan's in the west
 
 Fleet Sti'eet 191 
 
 puzzle to the schoolboys who stare at them 
 through the windows ; there are members of 
 Parliament, doubtless, who would at this hour 
 be unable to explain the meaning of this or 
 that humorous grouping ; but the drawing is 
 always so admirable and so full of life and 
 movement that people look at it and stick 
 to it for its own sake. I always stop at that 
 PtmcJi corner, and try to get close up to 
 the window-pane and stare delighted. 
 
 At the other side of the little court stands 
 the ]]\irld office. The glimpse of that 
 little court is a pretty picture. One gets a 
 sudden, unexpected impression of trees and 
 old houses, and the stone tower of a church. 
 The church tower looks ancient and time- 
 honoured — a little out of keeping, seemingly, 
 with the modern humours of Mr. Punch and 
 the Society gossip of Atlas. But there is 
 really no incongruity ; life is all like that, and 
 would be much less interesting if it were not 
 so. Take the oldest and most venerable 
 church in England ; when it was in its youth 
 there was satirical talk and Society gossip going
 
 192 Charing Cross to St. PauT s 
 
 on under the shadow of its spires and towers. 
 That which it was familiar with in its youth 
 it need not be ashamed at in its old age. 
 The IVor/d, too, was like Punch an 
 
 
 -~//,^- 
 
 THE WINDOWS OF "PUNCH" 
 
 innovation. Like Punch, it had numerous 
 imitators and rivals who soon dropped out 
 of rivalry, and some who still hold on in 
 the competition. The World started, for 
 England, the popular and personal Society
 
 
 i 
 
 
 ST. BR IDE S I'ASSAGE 
 
 o
 
 Fleet Street 195 
 
 journal. The Owl was altogether a differ- 
 ent sort of thing ; it was very clever and 
 very brilliant, no doubt, but its cleverness 
 and brilliancy were meant for the circles 
 which have the Foreign Office as their centre, 
 while Atlas naturally appeals in'bi et orbi, 
 to all. I do not often agree with the political 
 opinions of the IVorld, but one must re- 
 cognise the fact that here is a clever Society 
 paper which a young woman may read. 
 Gossip — personal gossip ? No doubt per- 
 sonal gossip is an objectionable thing from the 
 point of view of the higher morality ; and of 
 course the point of view of the higher morality 
 ought to be the point of view of every one of 
 us. Only it is not. And we do nearly all of 
 us indulge, and even delight, in personal 
 gossip, even when it is spiced with a little 
 scandal. Is it not something, then, to have 
 our personal gossip served up to us by clever 
 men — and I suppose I may say by clever 
 women — by men and women of education, 
 who understand and instinctively feel where 
 the line ought to be drawn, and to whom it
 
 196 Charing Cross to St. Panfs 
 
 comes natural to distinguish between the 
 gossip which causes a smile and the gossip 
 which compels a blush? I daresay I should 
 feel loftily proud of my austere virtue if I 
 could declare with truth (or concerning 
 "Truth,") that I never read these Society 
 papers. But I do read them, and shall con- 
 tinue doing so — and go to, then ! 
 
 More of the boyish population crowd 
 around the windows of Punch than around 
 the panes of the World. Ptinch has 
 cartoons, the World has none ; and the 
 boy, as a rule, takes but slight interest in the 
 doings of Belgravia, and the Court drawing- 
 rooms, and the interchange of friendly 
 badinage between " Edmund " and " Henry." 
 But observe the totally different sort of crowd 
 around the windows of the Sporting News ! 
 What a number of billycock hats ! and what 
 an expressive article of headgear the billycock 
 hat becomes on the head of a Londoner! 
 Look at the open-mouthed hobbledehoy with 
 his hands thrust loosely into his pockets ! 
 Every hat is expressive, but I think the
 
 ; ,j ««;; 
 
 
 
 ^\^-i I y^ '':■ 'M twill te • ^ 
 
 |.f I, M i,f:: a 
 
 " SI'OKTING LU'E " OFFICE
 
 Fleet Street 199 
 
 billycock tells its story best of all. The 
 shovel hat may deceive ; It may sometimes — 
 not to speak irreverently — cover the brows 
 that a billycock would have more appropri- 
 ately adorned. Many of the curiously anti- 
 quated hats worn by ancient members of the 
 House of Peers may likewise lend themselves 
 to an imposition. There may now and then 
 be levity, frivolity, a very passion for idle 
 amusement, concealed beneath these relics of 
 the past. 1 have often wondered, by the way, 
 where these aged peers get these "quaint 
 and olden" hats! No man now sees such a 
 headpiece in a hatter's shop. Do the aged 
 peers insist on having the hats specially built 
 for them after some venerable fantasy of their 
 own ? Or did it happen that in various cases a 
 young nobleman of the time of D'Orsay or 
 Tom Duncombe's brightest years, or Lynd- 
 hurst's dressy days, was smitten with a passion 
 for some particular beaver, and vowed that he 
 would wear that pattern, and that pattern 
 only, till death did him and it part? Then did 
 each man go to his hatter and leave with him
 
 200 Charinz Cross to St. Paur s 
 
 a pattern, and insist that that, and that alone, 
 must be suppHed to him during the rest of his 
 existence ? It may be so ; we all know about 
 the shepherd's -plaid trousers which were 
 repeated and reproduced for Brougham while 
 generations of perpetual change rolled on. 
 Count Cavour was intensely fond of one 
 costume — a snuft- coloured swallowtail, with 
 trousers and waistcoat to correspond : his 
 tailor had instructions to supply him with that 
 costume, and that costume only. Perhaps the 
 hats of the ancient peers are furnished on the 
 same principle. But I have wandered far 
 from the Sporting Life and the billycock 
 to the House of Lords and its old-world hats, 
 and even to the arcades of Turin and the 
 snuff-coloured coat of the great Cavour. 
 
 Then there is the office of the Daily 
 Neius, the advertising and selling office — 
 the office in Fleet Street. An eager crowd 
 has gathered in front of its windows — some 
 important news has been placarded ; but it is 
 an earnest crowd, with not many boys or 
 billycocks in it. How these Fleet Street
 
 Fleet Street 201 
 
 newspaper offices are making Fleet Street 
 a palatial thoroughfare in our days! The 
 Telegraph, the Standard, the Chronicle — ^they 
 are like some of the oreat American news- 
 
 o 
 
 paper offices in vastness, in arrangement, and 
 in splendour. Admiring all these, however, 
 yet let me be allowed to tell of the positive 
 fascination wrought upon me by one collection 
 of old houses a little more westward in Fleet 
 Street, which appear to be a very rookery of 
 newspaper offices and all manner of public 
 institutions. These houses are very old. 
 They are highly picturesque. No doubt 
 they are as firm and staunch and strong as 
 they are old ; but that is not the impression 
 given to the ignorant and superficial gazer — 
 to me, for example. They seem marked out 
 and "girdled" for speedy demolition. The 
 odd thouorht comes into the mind that the 
 various newspaper agents have simply taken 
 possession of them as squatting families have 
 settled down in ruined piles; or that the news- 
 papers have swooped on them only for the 
 purpose of hanging out each his banner on
 
 202 CJiaring Cross to St. Pmirs 
 
 the outward walls for the business of adver- 
 tisement. I read the names of famous 
 provincial journals — of musical journals ; I 
 read, too, of various companies and institu- 
 tions ; and I read of somebody's oyster-rooms. 
 The whole place looks oddly like a dilapi- 
 dated hive. These houses will be pulled 
 down probably some early day, and hand- 
 some structures will grow up in their stead. 
 Then the great provincial newspaper offices, 
 and the offices of the musical journals, and 
 the companies and institutions, will look quite 
 in their right place, and there will be no 
 incongruous suggestion of progress and 
 prosperity taking up their home among ruins. 
 But will the sight be quite so picturesque 
 then for the searching Doctor Syntax of the 
 London streets ? Perhaps not. The incon- 
 gruous Is surely very often an important 
 element in the creation of the picturesque. 
 
 An elderly man, in a deer-stalker hat, is 
 seen about this part of the street. I mean 
 he is seen in Mr. Pennell's sketch, and Mr. 
 Pennell's sketch is just as good as the street
 
 S ' v' ''.1 
 
 
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 ^-)/rFt^ 
 
 
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 ^ 7 ^aT^^--- 
 
 "DAILY news" office
 
 Fleet Street 205 
 
 — just as real as the street. I know that 
 elderly man, but he does not come from 
 Sheffield, in the sense of the phrase which 
 belongs to that popular piece, "A Pair of 
 Spectacles." I know the man — at least, I 
 know the kind of man. His face was hand- 
 some, it is still delicate and refined ; a little 
 wasted, a little pinched even, but "cheery 
 still," like Abou-ben-Adhem, may whose 
 tribe increase ! Our friend in the deer- 
 stalker has had some trouble in his time. 
 Henry of Navarre said of himself that the 
 wind of adversity blowing early and long 
 in his face turned his hair prematurely 
 white. So it has evidently been with our 
 friend. His has a orentle, subdued ex- 
 pression about his eyes and lips. He has 
 not got on well in life. He has a wife and a 
 large family — all daughters. His is exactly 
 the appearance of a man who has only 
 daughters. He is intensely fond of his wife 
 and the girls, and his wife and the girls are 
 intensely fond of him. But the girls still 
 believe in him, and the wife has long since,
 
 2o6 Charinor Cross to St. PanT s 
 
 gently and considerately, ceased to do so. 
 When I say she has ceased to believe in 
 him, I mean that she has ceased to believe 
 in his projects and in his capacity for success. 
 As to his personal integrity, his unselfish- 
 ness, and his love, her faith in him has waxed 
 rather than waned since the day they were 
 married, at the time when every one said he 
 was a rising young man certain to get on. 
 But she no longer believes in his plans, his 
 projects, his new ways of making money — 
 she has outlived too many of them. She is 
 resigned, however, and is happy, knowing 
 his worth. The crirls have still the fullest, 
 and even the proudest, faith in everything 
 he undertakes. They will probably all get 
 married — they are just the girls whom 
 sensible and honest young men would like to 
 marry — and papa will always be a hero to 
 them. Poor dear man ! he is a failure in 
 many ways — in most ways — but not in all. 
 A man cannot be said to have wholly failed 
 in life whose wife loves him to the last, 
 and who is always a hero in the eyes of his
 
 Fleet Street 207 
 
 daughters. There are many great worldly 
 successes not quite so enviable as that. 
 
 The traffic becomes perplexed, seemingly 
 inextricable, seemingly impossible, as we get 
 on towards Ludgate Circus. I have already 
 tried to do justice to the heroic figure of the 
 policeman, standing in the midst of the rush 
 and surge and swirl, upright and motionless, 
 like the Eddystone amid the stormy waves. 
 Let me try to describe another heroic figure 
 of a different kind. Be pleased to look at 
 that omnibus trying to thread its way 
 through that moving mass of horses, wheels, 
 and men. Where is that omnibus to get to ? 
 How can it edge itself in any farther? It 
 must come into collision with something ; it 
 must upset something or be upset — perhaps 
 upset and be upset. It is leaning over 
 ominously to one side already, like a sailing 
 yacht in a squall. Now look at the driver 
 seated on his box. Does he seem dismayed ? 
 Does he seem even anxious ? Not he ! He 
 is listening with an air of keen and wide- 
 awake interest to something that a passenger
 
 2o8 CJiaring Cross to St. PaitTs 
 
 on the box-seat is telling him. Perhaps it 
 is a good story, and there is a whimsical 
 expression on the driver's face which would 
 seem to warrant such an assumption. Any- 
 how his attention appears to be all absorbed 
 in the story, or whatever it is, as if the worst 
 perils of the traffic had no concern for him ; 
 as if no one had ever heard of a collision in 
 the streets of the City. But do you suppose 
 that he has not his eyes and enough of his 
 mind on the traffic, and on his own task } 
 Of course he has. He knows what he is 
 about. Half an eye is enough for him. He 
 is master of his subject. He can spare ear 
 and interest enough for the talk of his 
 companion ; he misses not a point of it : but 
 he can mind his own business all the time. 
 No collision for him ; he will upset nothing, 
 and be upset by nothing. Now, this is a 
 different kind of heroic figure from the other. 
 There are heroes who are silent, stern, un- 
 moved on the battlefield, wholly wrapped up 
 in the business of battle. There are heroes 
 who must take battle itself easily and lightly,
 
 Fleet Street 209 
 
 and who can make or enjoy a joke at the 
 moment when preparing to charge. Let us 
 recognise the heroism of both orders of hero, 
 and just feel a preference according to our 
 own personal inclination. I invite no decision 
 between my grave and statuesque policeman 
 and my easy, happy-go-lucky omnibus-driver. 
 Each is a characteristic figure of the London 
 streets, and each has been given to us by Mr. 
 Pennell with a fidelity and sympathy which 
 is in itself an inspiration. Each is given to 
 us in his habit as he lives, just as you may 
 see him in the City every day. 
 
 Fleet Street is all contrasts, for any one 
 who will only allow a little ray of fancy to 
 help him with its divining light. We have 
 seen our heroic policeman and our heroic 
 cabman. Now let us cast a glance at that 
 trim little milliner with her two bundles. 
 She trips along bravely through all " the 
 thunderous smother " — the phrase, I think, is 
 from a poem of Leigh Hunt's — and it does 
 not disturb her nerves in the least. But the 
 contrast I was going to draw is not between 
 
 p
 
 2IO C/iariiig Cross to St. PauVs 
 
 her and anybody else— I was only going to 
 say that the office of Messrs. Cook has just 
 come into sight. You don't see the contrast. 
 You ask, "What contrast?" There is the 
 most home-keeping creature in London 
 perhaps, and yonder is Cook's Tourist's 
 Office, where you can take a ticket to go 
 anywhere over the world or round the world. 
 For any one with an inborn love of travel to 
 go into such an office is as tantalising as to 
 ramble among the Liverpool docks or along 
 the quays of Marseilles, and see the vessels 
 that are coming from and going to the far- 
 off ports to which one's yearning heart and 
 fancy strain. That tourist office is tapestried 
 with announcements of return tickets to and 
 from all the famous places of the globe. 
 The Rhine ? Well, the name of the Rhine 
 makes one melancholy, for the world of to- 
 day has wellnigh forgotten the Rhine. 
 Byron sang of it ; Disraeli apostrophised it 
 in passionate rhetoric, wherein he appealed 
 to it as '• River of my youth ! " — and the 
 Rhine is as lovely as ever — and who raves
 
 Fleet Street 2 1 1 
 
 about it now ? Alas ! rivers come into 
 fashion and go out of it, like other things. 
 Switzerland, of course, Italy, the Danube, the 
 Bosphorus, the Nile, the Holy Land, India, 
 Japan, China. Ah ! what delightful and yet 
 torturing invitations to some who cannot 
 accept them ! But our little milliner now — 
 she would not care. She does not want to 
 see Karnak and the Tombs of the Kinofs : 
 the name of the Taj- Mahal awakens in her 
 mind no manner of interest. She would hate 
 the idea of being packed off to China or 
 Japan. The passion for travel, for wander- 
 ing, for seeing new places, is in the breast of 
 every boy ; but girls do not, as a rule, take 
 any interest in " Sinbad the Sailor." Some 
 women of education do, indeed, get a passion 
 for travel and even for exploring. Most of 
 us know women who have made themselves 
 famous as travellers and even as explorers. 
 But to the ordinary girl, even to the ordinary 
 educated girl, much travel is a mere bore. 
 As for our little milliner, the idea of travellinof 
 abroad never entered into her head. What
 
 I 2 Charing Cross to St. PatiF s 
 
 would be the good if it did ? How could 
 she travel ? Yet the same would apply to 
 her young man, her sweetheart — and we may 
 be sure he never passes Cook's or Gaze's 
 office without lingering long and longingly at 
 the windows, and studying the announce- 
 ments, and sighing with a desire to have a 
 ticket for everywhere. He and the little 
 milliner have been to Greenwich and to 
 Epping, and that is travel enough for her. 
 But he yearns for something farther off, and 
 perhaps when they are married and doing 
 pretty well he may take her for a little trip to 
 Dieppe and to Paris. We may be sure that 
 the impulse will be his and not hers — that he 
 will delight in the trip and she will put up 
 with it.
 
 VII 
 
 LUDGATE HILL 
 
 The railway bridge that crosses Ludgate 
 Hill was once the occasion of a fierce contro- 
 versy. It was a struggle between the artistic 
 and the practical — between the aesthetic and 
 the economic. It was the old controversy — 
 not quite so old as the hills, but certainly as 
 old as the very first time when industrial 
 science of the rudest form began to turn the 
 hills to account for the supposed benefit of 
 man. Why, then, should not Ludgate Hill 
 come on for her turn in the discussion ? 
 Ludgate Hill "waited for her time — which 
 time came," as Carlyle says, discoursing on a 
 quite different subject. The time came when 
 it was proposed to span Ludgate Hill with this
 
 2 14 Charing Cross to St. Paufs 
 
 railway bridge. As may be seen by Mr. 
 Pennell's sketch, the railway bridge itself is 
 
 THE KAILVVAY BRIDGE, lADGATE HILL 
 
 by no means an unlovely object. Regarded 
 as a railway bridge merely, it is rather a fine 
 work of art. Its iron tracery is delicate and 
 picturesque. But then, as a bridge crossing
 
 Ludoate Hill 2 r s 
 
 Ludgate Hill and cutting off from Fleet 
 
 Street the view of St. Paul's — how about it 
 
 when considered in that way ? Thus the 
 
 controversy arose. Mr. Ruskin struck in 
 
 with characteristic gallantry, and condemned 
 
 the practical principle which would spoil so 
 
 fine a street view for the convenience of a 
 
 railway and its passengers. I remember 
 
 favouring the public with some opinions of 
 
 my own on the same subject in a newspaper 
 
 with which I was then connected, and which 
 
 newspaper I have long outlived. My 
 
 opinions merely said ditto to Mr. Ruskin. 
 
 Yes, it was a fine street view — one of the 
 
 finest street views in London — which met the 
 
 eyes of those who looked up from Fleet 
 
 Street to Ludoate Hill and St. Paul's. It 
 
 was a grand historic sight. Many of the old 
 
 houses were still standing, and the whole 
 
 scene retained much of its medi.'eval aspect. 
 
 Let it be frankly owned that the view is 
 
 spoiled now — utterly spoiled. The railway 
 
 bridge bounds the horizon of one walking 
 
 from Fleet Street. He sees nothing but
 
 2 1 6 Ckarino- Cross to St. PauF s 
 
 that ; thinks of nothing but that. Perhaps I 
 should rather put it this way — he hardly sees 
 the bridge, for he does not think about it ; 
 but he sees nothing, also, and thinks of 
 nothing. Now, in the old days, a goodly 
 proportion of the wayfarers could hardly fail 
 to be struck by the hill, and the Cathedral on 
 its brow. But then the men of practical 
 progress, even if they are willing to admit all 
 this, will ask us what are the artistic or 
 aesthetic glimpses of a few visionaries and 
 dreamers when compared with the comfort 
 and the convenience of the thousands and 
 thousands who pass along in the railway, 
 backwards and forwards, every day ? 
 
 There it is, you see. If the controversy 
 were to go on all over again, I should not 
 take part in it. Not that I have changed 
 my opinions in the least as to the general 
 principle or as to this particular instance. 
 But where is the good of arguing on such a 
 subject ? The artistic always goes down 
 before what is called the practical in a matter 
 like that. " Keep your breath to cool your
 
 S'f#^ i''\\ 
 
 LUDGATE CIKCUS
 
 Ludgate Hill 219 
 
 porridge," was a good old Scottish proverb. 
 Keep your controversial ardour for something 
 in which it may possibly prevail. Against 
 railway bridges, and telegraph wires, and 
 other such works, it is of no account. 
 Against the genius of street placard and 
 advertisement it is of no account. The most 
 beautiful and venerable parts of our most 
 venerable and stately structures must be 
 accounted as of nothing when the genius of 
 Civilisation has need of a blow-hole on the 
 road hard by. We are not worse than other 
 civilised peoples. We are only doing as the 
 Romans do — observe the recent improve- 
 ments in what a Complete Letter-writer calls 
 "the Imperial City of the Caesars." There 
 will be tramways in Jerusalem yet — perhaps 
 there are such already ; some years have 
 passed since I was in Jerusalem. Does any 
 one know a lovelier river than the Hudson, 
 about West Point ? I do not. But the 
 rocks on the margin are utilised for the 
 purpose of advertising in flaring characters 
 the virtues of this man's bitters and that
 
 2 20 C/iarino- Cross to Sf. PaitTs 
 
 other man's pills. Therefore I, for one, give 
 up the fight. Let Mr. Ruskin battle on ; he 
 is " possessed," in the demoniac sense, by a 
 principle ; he has a mission. I would en- 
 courage him and wish him success, if there 
 were the slightest hope ; but there is not. 
 So why should London wait — for the effacing 
 and reconstructing fingers of modern utility ? 
 Let them efface ; let them reconstruct. Some 
 of us can still see in memory the Ludgate 
 Hill that was. Most of us do not care what 
 it was, or what it is, or what it is to be. But 
 I may be allowed to express a little regret 
 that Mr. Pennell did not see it and sketch it 
 before the beginning of the process which is 
 to improve it " from the face of all creation — 
 off the face of all creation." Some words 
 which I read lately in a most touching story 
 by M. Anatole France, come back to my 
 memory poignantly : " I grow sad, some- 
 times," says the noble old scholar who is 
 supposed to tell the story, "to think that the 
 effort which we make — we cultured persons, 
 so called — to retain and preserve dead things
 
 Ltidgatc Hill 221 
 
 is ci weary and a vain effort. All that has 
 lived is the necessary aliment of new 
 existences. The Arab who builds himself 
 a hut with the marbles of the temples of 
 Palmyra is more philosophic than all the con- 
 servators of the museums of London, of 
 Paris, and of Munich." So says the vener- 
 able hero of " The crime of Silvestre 
 Bonnard, Member of the Institute." Then 
 what a philosopher was the Turk who, like a 
 practical soldier, used the pillars and statues 
 of the Parthenon as targets ! But dear old 
 M. Bonnard did not mean what he said. He 
 was in a mood of despondency — a mood of 
 despair. He was giving up the fight he had 
 fought so long in vain. He had not Mr, 
 Ruskin's mission. He threw clown his 
 broken sword, but could not resist the 
 temptation to tling a few words of sarcasm 
 and scorn in the face of the conquering 
 Utility. 
 
 What a turmoil there is about Ludsfate 
 Circus ! What roofs, what telegraph wires 
 — what placards, ensigns, advertisements
 
 222 Charino; Cross to St. Paul' s 
 
 high in air — what omnibuses, carriages, 
 carts, cabs, donkey-carts, the cart which the 
 costermonger pushes before him, the mail- 
 carts, the carts of the Star newspaper, 
 equally red with those of Her Majesty's mail, 
 the oblong carts of the Parcel Post — all 
 these are on the earth, and make the firm 
 ground look like a quaking bog. The great 
 sisfns that are huncr out across the fronts of 
 houses, and on the tops of houses, make 
 Ludgate Circus look like a part of New 
 York. The Obelisk rises out of the throng 
 in the street like a solitary camel's head out 
 of the crowd of a pilgrimage. The spire 
 rising out of the pell-mell has more signifi- 
 cance. It invites us all to look up — up — 
 above " the city's rout and noise and 
 humming." I wonder how many wayfarers 
 in each day are touched by the appeal of the 
 spire and look upwards ! I wonder how 
 many who do look upwards are impelled 
 thereto by the spire's silent admonition, and 
 are the better for it ! That man yonder now 
 — he is looking up. He is gazing upwards
 
 
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 WILD S HOTEL
 
 Ludgate Hill 225 
 
 very earnestly — so earnestly that he runs 
 into the chest of a rough-looking person in a 
 fur cap, who is walking westward and striv- 
 ing the while to keep his eyes on something 
 eastward. The two collide, and our sky- 
 gazer makes an apology which sounds like 
 an imprecation. Was that all the lesson he 
 learned from the teaching of the church 
 spire ? No ; he would have learned some- 
 thing better if he had sought teaching there. 
 But he was only looking up to the sky to see 
 if it was going to rain. He was put into a 
 bad humour by the ominous aspect of the 
 closing and darkening clouds, and so when 
 the chance collision took place he was in the 
 mood for an imprecation. By the way, do 
 not look for the men or the collision in Mr. 
 Pennell's sketch ; they are my own invention. 
 Mr. Pennell's pencil is too good to be em- 
 ployed in working out such poor conceits. 
 
 The only thing worth noticing in this 
 poor conceit is that it illustrates a peculiarity 
 of the London streets, which I have long 
 been observing with a certain interest. 
 
 Q
 
 2 26 Charing Cross to St. Paiirs 
 
 Along London pavements — and I suppose 
 the pavements of other cities as well — the 
 men and women of what I may call, for want 
 of any better term, the educated classes, 
 walk straight on with their eyes to the front 
 of them. If they want to look into a shop 
 window they stop in their walk, go up to the 
 shop window, and look into it. But while 
 they are on the march they look before them. 
 Now observe the men and women, the lads 
 and lasses, of what we must call, for lack of 
 a better word, the uneducated class. You 
 will observe that five out of every six of 
 them are walking one way and looking 
 another way. Something a little distance 
 behind him has caught a man's attention. 
 It may be an organ and a monkey, it may 
 be an Oriental foreigner, it may be an 
 upset hansom or a fallen horse, it may be 
 anything. He cannot take his eyes from it, 
 and so he keeps on walking backwards. He 
 is moving, indeed, towards his destination, 
 but he still looks back to that he has left 
 behind him. Observe Mary Jane — or shall
 
 Ludgate Hill 227 
 
 we say Betsinda ? — with her perambulator 
 and her two young charges. She drives 
 them on directly, recklessly, remorselessly ; 
 but all the time her eyes are with her heart, 
 and that is in the shop windows, where all 
 the beautiful, beautiful things are displayed 
 for sale — the bonnets, the unmade-up silks, 
 the mantles of stamped velvet, the gauzy 
 dresses, the bewitching under-things that the 
 Oueen of the Fairies miofht wear, so delieht- 
 fully gossamer - like are they. She steers 
 her perambulator into groups of infuriated 
 pedestrians ; she rattles the bones of the 
 infants not only over the stones of the side- 
 walk, but over many living toes and insteps 
 and up sharply against human ankles. 
 Elderly ladies will deliberately stop, and 
 admonish and scold and threaten her. They 
 demand the name of her mistress, in order 
 that they may be enabled to lodge formal 
 complaint against her. Betsinda cares little 
 for all that. When the row is over she 
 looks before her, and steers straight for some 
 thirty seconds or so. Then her head turns
 
 2 28 Charing Cross to St. PattTs 
 
 on its axis again, her eyes gaze sideward. 
 She is with the bonnets and the dresses once 
 more, and with fearless faith she commits 
 her precious burden to the care of the 
 powers above. 
 
 If any one has not noticed this condition 
 of facts, this curious distinction of classes, I 
 can only pray him to open his eyes when 
 next he makes his way through a crowded 
 street in London, and then say whether 
 my general observation is not correct. I 
 suppose the philosophical explanation is not 
 far to seek. The working man is hurrying 
 to his work — he is tied to time. Betsinda 
 has been sent out for a clearly - defined 
 hour or two hours. The whistling errand- 
 boy must get his errands done within at least 
 plausible distance of punctuality and prompt- 
 ness. The young woman with the washing 
 is already looked for here and there. These 
 people cannot afford to lounge. If they 
 have hurried past some sight that interests 
 them they cannot quietly turn back, and 
 composedly feast their eyes upon it. All
 
 L^idgate Hill 229 
 
 they can do they do — and that is to keep 
 looking sidewards or backwards, and retain 
 it within their range of vision as long as they 
 may, while still hurrying onward in the other 
 direction — careless of collision, regardless of 
 reproach. The boy, of course, is the most 
 reckless of all. He will come rattling along 
 the pavement at a hand-gallop, with his head 
 positively twisted behind him like that of a 
 professional contortionist. No matter what 
 the risk to himself or to others, he will not 
 lose sight of anything that amuses or in- 
 terests him so long as his straining eyes in 
 his contorted head can hold it within his 
 perverse horizon. If he gets into a collision 
 with some steady wayfarer he does not mind. 
 Indeed, he considers it prime fun. The 
 t4ireats of an elderly gentleman have no 
 terror for him ; at the worst he can run much 
 quicker than the elderly gentleman. For 
 the admonitions of an elderly lady he has no 
 ear. He interrupts her lecture, perhaps, by 
 some disparaging remark upon her bonnet ; 
 possibly he asks her, with sudden affectation
 
 230 Charino- Cross to St. Patirs 
 
 of friendly and intimate interest, "What 
 price that ? " He does not wait to hear 
 what the cost of the article may have been, 
 but plunges whistling on his way. The 
 attempted admonition has done nothing but 
 to make the elderly lady, her very self, an 
 object of droll curiosity to him, and he now 
 keeps his head twisted backward to enjoy as 
 long as he can the sight of her bewilderment 
 and her futile anoer. 
 
 Do not ascend Ludgate Hill without 
 bestowing a thought on Paternoster Row. 
 Many an anxious heart has beat high as 
 the owner and bearer of the heart paused in 
 trepidation on the threshold of some house 
 in the Row. To the young and timid 
 author the place was holy ground. Many 
 such aspirants must have felt inclined to put 
 their somewhat broken shoes from off their 
 feet in an effort at propitiation. The place 
 is less distinctively, less exclusively, literary 
 now than it was in former days. There are 
 publishers now in Piccadilly and the Strand, 
 and Oxford Street, and Albemarle Street,
 
 
 Sm^r r. U^- J*fJi 
 
 ^*i 
 
 
 ST. martin's, ludgatk
 
 Ludeafc Hill 233 
 
 <*> 
 
 and Burlington Street, and Covent Garden, 
 and Cornhill, and many other places ; but 
 some of the greatest of publishing houses 
 still hold on to the Row, and several newer 
 houses have started life there. Talk of 
 London ehosts — talk of haunted London — 
 what region could be more ghost-frequented 
 than Paternoster Row ? The ghosts of all 
 the literary projects which perished in their 
 early youth ; the novels, the poems, the 
 essays, the volumes of travel, the transla- 
 tions, which died in Paternoster Row — which 
 the public would not keep alive, which the 
 world only too willingly let die ! I should 
 think that at every midnight there must be 
 as many spectral forms in that gloomy lane 
 as were gathered at the midnight review of 
 the dead Napoleon in the German poem. I 
 would go there some midnight to see, only 
 for fear of one pale little ghost which I do 
 not wish to meet : it is the ghost of a volume 
 of translations from a foreign poet, at which 
 I once toiled. Let it pass ; let us speak no 
 more of it. There was to me one comfort
 
 2 34 Charing Ci^oss to St. PauTs 
 
 in its failure. No one knew anything about 
 it. The reproach of the death fell not on 
 my head. I name it not. As Beranger 
 said of Waterloo, "Its name shall never 
 sadden page of mine." 
 
 St Paul's ! We are standing inside the 
 great doorway which looks upon the statue 
 of Queen Anne, and the railway bridge, and 
 the crowd below. Few people who pass 
 hurriedly by have any idea of the simplicity, 
 the sympathy, the solemnity of that entrance 
 — that porch. Mr. Pennell has put but a 
 few — a very few — figures there. A young- 
 man stands on the threshold and looks down 
 on the perpetual movement of the street. A 
 girl is just about to go down the steps and 
 plunge into the living stream. A man and 
 woman have just come within the porch. 
 They are strangers evidently ; they look with 
 awe, and move with reverential slowness. 
 The man has already taken off his hat. Dr. 
 Johnson would approve of him. The whole 
 sketch admirably suggests the presence of a 
 solemn sanctuary. It is a sanctuary — a
 
 Ludgatc Hill 235 
 
 sanctuary from the crowd, and the rush of 
 business, and the struggle for money, and all 
 the incarnate vulgarities of common daily life. 
 It ought to do one's soul some good just to 
 look up at that great temple as he passes on 
 his way. Within all is quiet. No service is 
 going on, but the organ is breathing, and 
 there are a few listeners scattered here and 
 there in the cool semi-darkness. St. Paul s 
 is well placed — there in the very thick of the 
 crowd and the traffic. It would show to 
 more advantage, no doubt, if it were set upon 
 an open plateau. I knew a dreamy man 
 once who had a great ambition. He wanted 
 to be rich, enormously rich, and for what do 
 you think ? That he might buy up all the 
 houses round St. Paul's, and all the ware- 
 houses and wharves between it and the river, 
 and clear them completely away, and allow 
 the cathedral to stand revealed in all its pro- 
 portions, isolated on a broad clear elevation 
 above the Thames. My friend's was indeed 
 an artistic and an exalted ambition. With 
 what pride the Londoner — with what fresh
 
 236 Charing Cross to St. Panrs 
 
 delight and wonder the stranger — would 
 see that dome and those walls rising unin- 
 terrupted, undisfigured, in full display above 
 the Thames ! Where in the heart of any 
 great city would there be such another view 
 of a grand cathedral ? But, after all, is it not 
 better as it is ? Is not the place of such a 
 cathedral more fittingly set in and amidst the 
 crowd ? The work of the pastor does not lie 
 in picturesque and dignified solitude, but 
 among the houses, and the cottages, and the 
 garrets. I always think in this way of St. 
 Paul's. Let it stand there with the waves of 
 the world's traffic beating on its very steps. 
 Some wayfarer may come ashore now and 
 then and mount the steps, and enter the quiet 
 and darkling church, and be reminded that the 
 city is not all the world and all the worlds. I 
 like to think of that dome rising high above 
 all those roofs, and chimneys, and gables, and 
 signs, and advertisements, and telegraph wires. 
 I do not care to think of the whispering-gallery 
 and the show-places of any kind, or even of 
 the tomb of " the Duke " himself, or of any of
 
 Lndgate Hill 237 
 
 the curious monuments in which half-draped 
 personages from classic mythology pretend to 
 be in grief over sturdy British soldiers and 
 sailors. I do not care for the hum and drone 
 of the verger explaining all about his sights. 
 All that has, to my mind, nothing to do with 
 the reality of St. Paul's. The mission of St. 
 Paul's, to my thinking, is in its standing 
 firmly planted there, in the very centre of the 
 commonplace traffic, and bearing its silent 
 testimony to other and greater realities. It 
 stands and lifts its dome into the air, and its 
 dome is surmounted by that Cross, which 
 surely any creed or sect of men who are 
 worshippers of anything may recognise to be, 
 as this very Cross on St. Paul's was described 
 in the last generation by a great parliamentary 
 orator who was not of the English Church, 
 " a sign of hope — a signal of salvation ! "
 
 VIII 
 
 ST. Paul's 
 
 What a natural habit it is to personate into 
 living and even into human form some inan- 
 imate object or structure with which one has 
 become familiar and which is dear ! No 
 wonder that in the days of the Dryads people 
 gave life and character and human sym- 
 pathies to every tree and fountain and 
 river which they had long known and which 
 they loved. We nearly all find ourselves 
 doincr much the same sort of thinof with 
 buildings which we have long known, and 
 which have grown to be in a certain sense 
 a part of our existence. I always thus 
 endow St. Paul's Cathedral with life and 
 human nature and sympathy. I cannot
 
 St PauFs 239 
 
 well explain what early associations and 
 chances have made St. Paul's a more living 
 influence to me than the much grander and 
 nobler Westminster Abbey ; but so it is, 
 and I feel as if St. Paul's were a living in- 
 fluence over all that region of the metropolis 
 which is surveyed by its ball and its cross. 
 But in another sense it is unlike other build- 
 ings to me. It is not one long-lived, long- 
 lived cathedral ; it is rather a generation of 
 cathedrals. Westminster Abbey takes us 
 back in unbroken continuity of history to the 
 earlier days of England's budding greatness. 
 Westminster itself, nevertheless, was only 
 called so in the beginning to distinguish it from 
 the earlier East Minster, which was either the 
 existing St. Paul's or a cathedral standing on 
 Tower Hill. It would seem, then, that St. 
 Paul's rather than Westminster Abbey ought 
 to represent the gradual movement of English 
 history and English thought, and the growth 
 of the metropolis. But observe the difference. 
 Westminster Abbey has always, since its 
 erection in the old days about the time when
 
 240 Charing Cross to St. PatWs 
 
 Pan was definitely giving up the use of his 
 Pagan horn, been sedately watching over 
 London. It has been reconstructed here and 
 there, of course — repaired and renovated, 
 touched up and decorated with new adorn- 
 ments in tribute of grateful piety ; but it 
 is ever and always the same Westminster 
 Abbey. Now observe the history of St. 
 Paul's. St. Paul's has fallen and died time 
 after time, and been revived and restored. 
 It has risen new upon new generations. It 
 has perished in flame again and again, like a 
 succession of martyrs, and has come up afresh 
 and with new -spangled ore flamed in the 
 forehead of the morning sky. St. Paul's is a 
 religious or ecclesiastical dynasty rather than 
 a cathedral. It has been destroyed so often, 
 and has risen again in so many different 
 shapes, that it seems as if each succeeding 
 age were putting its fresh stamp and mint- 
 mark on it, and so commending it to the 
 special service of each new generation. One 
 cannot but think that — let its authorities, its 
 Dean and Chapter, and the rest, take all the
 
 S/. Pattr s 241 
 
 best and most devoted care they can of it — 
 St. Paul's is not destined to hold its present 
 shape for a very long stretch of time. I do 
 not desire my words to be like the story of 
 the watchful and warned parent which is 
 found in all literatures, from y^sop and the 
 Arabian Nights downwards — the story of 
 the father who is warned that an early death 
 is impending over his dear and only son, and 
 who locks the boy for greater security into a 
 lofty tower or into a subterranean cavern — 
 the tale is told in different ways — and behold 
 it is all of no use, for the very precautions 
 taken to save the lad only tend to his earlier 
 and surer destruction. It may be thus with 
 the Cathedral of St. Paul's. I hope the Dean 
 and Chapter will not think me ill-omened with 
 my prophecies of evil. I hope they will not feel 
 to me as is usually felt by less considerate 
 and enlightened persons towards even the 
 well-intentioned who set out to warn and to 
 alarm with forebodings of evil things to come. 
 I have no warning to give, and therein I am 
 no doubt less excusable than most of those 
 
 R
 
 242 CJiaring Cross to St. Paiifs 
 
 who forecast sad troubles, for I cannot pre- 
 tend to have any idea of what the danger is, 
 or how it may be averted, or whence it is to 
 arrive. I know nothing about it, and the 
 Dean and Chapter themselves do not wish 
 well to their noble Cathedral more cordially 
 than I do. But I keep thinking of the past, 
 and I cannot help murmuring to myself that 
 the mission of St. Paul's is, as I have said, to 
 be a succession or dynasty of cathedrals, and 
 not to be one perennial structure with time- 
 proof and fire-proof walls and an unbroken 
 history. 
 
 This birth and re -birth give, to my 
 thinking, an entirely peculiar interest to St. 
 Paul's Cathedral. Think what its different 
 generations could have told to all around ! 
 Another great church — Westminster Abbey, 
 for example — grows up amid growing history, 
 and is a part of its gradual movement, and 
 so does not notice it. Each day makes its 
 slight and almost imperceptible change, and 
 the cathedral changes with the day, and is all- 
 unconscious of it. Westminster Abbey could
 
 X 
 u 
 
 K 
 U 
 
 Si
 
 S/. Pilars 245 
 
 not tell how Roman dominion gradually 
 faded, how Saxon gave place to Norman, 
 and Tudor followed Plantagenet, and Stuart 
 came to reign and to fade, and a new dynasty 
 galloped in on the white horse of Hanover. 
 One can imagine Westminster Abbey con- 
 fusing new pageantry with old, the impres- 
 sions of yesterday with the memories of 
 centuries past, and hashing up the wedding 
 of some mediaeval prince with that of Mr. 
 Henry M. Stanley. But St. Paul's, as we 
 see it, was re-born into a world quite new to 
 it only two centuries ago. It came then into 
 new being with a quick re- born conscious- 
 ness, taking fresh and eager notice of every- 
 thing it saw. Above all, it could see and 
 take account of change. " See here — and 
 here — that was not so when I looked on this 
 earth before ! What has gone with this or 
 that place, this or that dynasty, which I 
 remember stout and flourishing only a 
 hundred years ago or thereabouts ? " Each 
 revival means a new Hegira, a new point of 
 comparison, a new standard of excellence, a
 
 246 C/mrino- Cross to St. Paul's 
 
 new inspiration of sympathy ; it may be a 
 regret for the past, it may be a hope for the 
 future. Thus St. Paul's has re-steeped, re- 
 newed again and again, its sentiments of 
 companionship with humanity. St. Paul's is 
 always young, that is, comparatively young — 
 two centuries back to the last birth — that 
 after the Great Fire ; then another stretch to 
 the former destruction and regeneration, and 
 then back to another and another, until the 
 first St. Paul's stands up in the raw dawn of 
 London's history — always young, and yet en- 
 riched with the traditions, and much more 
 than the traditions, the actual experiences, of 
 centuries on centuries. This Cathedral, this 
 generation of cathedrals, ought to be able to 
 teach us lessons such as no English church 
 endowed with a monotony of antiquity could 
 well suggest. 
 
 That was a strange period of English 
 history when the former St. Paul's Cathedral 
 went into ashes amid the Great Fire of 
 London. We can see that time through the 
 eyes of two keen and shrewd observers, and
 
 vS/, Paurs 247 
 
 never in the world were two contempo- 
 raneous observers less like to each other ! 
 How seriously and sternly Evelyn took 
 everything ! With what prosaic, matter-of- 
 fact, ignoble tolerance Mr. Pepys took every- 
 thing ! INIr. Pepys would have listened with 
 interest and a sort of platonic approval to 
 Casanova's account of his amours, could 
 he have lived to hear the narrative. He 
 would not really have approved of such 
 discourse or admired such a career. He 
 would probably have told Mrs. Pepys in 
 private what he thought of the pilgrim of 
 erotic love, and he would certainly not have 
 wished her to make the acquaintance of 
 Casanova. But if Casanova happened to 
 stand high in Court favour, we may be sure 
 Mr. Pepys would have chanced the reputation 
 of Mrs, Pepys and encouraged in her a 
 friendly reception of the foreign blackguard. 
 It would have been hard to get Evelyn to 
 understand that there really could be a man 
 like Casanova ; but if he did get to under- 
 stand him he would have allowed Casanova
 
 248 Charing Cross to St. PcuiF s 
 
 to know what he thought of him, and that 
 without stint or measure. Never was in 
 Court history a more stately, pure-souled 
 gentleman than Evelyn — sweet, high-minded, 
 high-cultured ; a little cold, perhaps, a little 
 over- fastidious, exacting too remorselessly 
 from all humanity that austere morality which 
 came naturally to himself — the Don Quixote 
 of his day and his society, as Pepys assuredly 
 was the Sancho Panza. Pepys was in his 
 queer sort of way a moral man too ; he would 
 have been a very respectable man if he 
 had lived in the days of George the Third 
 and Dr. Johnson. Even as it was he cer- 
 tainly would have preferred moral men to 
 rakes and libertines ; but if the rakes and 
 libertines were highly-placed courtiers he was 
 not the person to weary and worry them by 
 discoursing moral lessons ; he would have 
 thought it better form and more prudent to fall 
 in with their talk and let it be supposed that 
 he admitted a general approval of their ways 
 and their principles of life — so far as they did 
 not relate too directly to Mrs. Pepys. It was
 
 S/. Pdii/'s 249 
 
 the destiny of these two men to record in 
 personal memoirs their impressions of Court 
 society about the time when St. Paul's was 
 burnt down and rebuilt, and surely the world 
 does not contain two such sincere and faithful 
 pictures of the same scenes and the same 
 age drawn with such different pencils and 
 from such different points of view. The 
 value of these books is beyond computation, 
 and the value of one is immensely enhanced 
 by the value of the other. I should like to 
 set off two passages against each other. 
 Take the few lines in which Pepys records 
 the fact that he was permitted by a laundress 
 or a waiting- maid, I think, to gaze upon 
 Lady Castlemaine's laced petticoats and 
 smocks, and his remark that it did his heart 
 good to see those pretty and dainty garments. 
 Take Evelyn's stern comment on the death 
 of the King, and his picture of the scene in 
 which not loner before he had seen him sur- 
 rounded by his favourite women and his 
 riotous men companions, gaming and fooling, 
 daffing the world aside and bidding it pass.
 
 250 Charing Cross to St. Paurs 
 
 in much more ignoble sense than Shake- 
 speare ascribes to Harry the Prince of Wales 
 and his gay and gallant comrades. " And 
 now," Evelyn sums up, "is all in the dust !" 
 Probably there was not a pin to choose 
 between Evelyn's opinion of Lady Castlemaine 
 and Pepys's — probably Pepys, in conversing 
 with his wife of quiet evenings, described 
 Lady Castlemaine in words which austere 
 Evelyn would hardly have cared to repeat. 
 But Pepys could do homage in public not 
 only to Lady Castlemaine herself, but even 
 to Lady Castlemaine's laced petticoats hang- 
 ing on a line to dry. Evelyn scowled at vice 
 even in the highest place, and pulled his hat 
 upon his brows and went the other way ; 
 Evelyn would lose his life rather than bow 
 down to Gessler's hat in the market-place. 
 Pepys would willingly, if he were called upon, 
 have clone public homage in the market- 
 place to the laced smock of Gessler's mistress 
 exhibited on the top of a pole for the purpose 
 of testing the loyal submissiveness of the 
 community.
 
 S^. Paid's 251 
 
 Evelyn has something direct and personal 
 to do with the immediate subject on which 
 we are engaged. When St. Paul's was 
 burnt, Evelyn was appointed one of the 
 Commissioners for its rebuilding. The same 
 event, by the way, threw increased cares upon 
 Pepys, for he was what we should now call 
 Secretary to the Admiralty ; and the Plague, 
 the Fire of London, and the Dutch in the 
 Medway and the Thames, occupied much of 
 the attention of Pepys's official superiors for 
 three successive years, and devolved the 
 business of the Admiralty Department almost 
 altogether upon him. Pepys and Evelyn 
 both lived to see, or at least both might have 
 seen, the public opening of the choir of Sir 
 Christopher Wren's new cathedral. Neither 
 lived to see the completion of the whole 
 structure, with its dome proudly surmounting 
 London. Evelyn outlived Pepys by two or 
 three years ; the chances are that in literature 
 Pepys may outlive Evelyn. 
 
 Was there ever known in the history of 
 the world and its churches any cathedral
 
 252 Charing C^^oss to St. Paurs 
 
 which suffered from fire Hke St. Paul's ? 
 The whole career of the church was an 
 ordeal by fire. It was injured by fire a 
 hundred years before Westminster Hall was 
 built ; it was totally destroyed by fire in the 
 eleventh century, and it took nearly two 
 centuries to restore it to anything like its 
 former magnificence. "Away! we lose our- 
 selves in light," might have been its motto, 
 for it was all but completely destroyed by fire 
 in the fifteenth century, and its spire, which 
 then claimed to be the highest in the world, 
 was destroyed by fire a century later. Thus, 
 we have brought it to the terrible days of 
 1666, when it went under with so much of 
 London to accompany it — one of the most 
 tremendous confiaQ^rations recorded in the 
 history of great cities. Then came the 
 Commission to rebuild it, of which brave John 
 Evelyn was a member, and then Sir Chris- 
 topher Wren raised the monument to his 
 fame, which those who would question his 
 renown have only to look upon and be 
 satisfied. The great architect sleeps within
 
 S^. Pa?(l's 253 
 
 the shelter of the Cathedral which he raised 
 up out of dust and ashes, and never was 
 simpler, nobler, or juster epitaph inscribed on 
 the tomb of man than that which commends 
 his remains to the reverence of the world. 
 The Great Fire of 1666 was but an accident 
 in the architectural career of Sir Christopher 
 Wren. He had in any case been appointed, 
 long before the fire, one of the Commission 
 to consider and report upon the entire rebuild- 
 ing of the Cathedral, which had been put 
 together in a patchy sort of way, one man's 
 notion of architectural beauty and fitness 
 overriding rather than supplementing another. 
 For a long time it had been resolved to 
 obtain symmetry, cohesion, and consistency 
 in the building, and it had at length begun to 
 make itself manifest that such an object 
 could only be obtained by the pulling down 
 of the old structure, and the erection of a 
 new cathedral which should be designed by 
 the intellect and the imagination of one man, 
 the creation of one exalted intellect. But 
 the scheme got pushed aside by one inter-
 
 2 54 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 
 
 ference and another. Politics interfered ; 
 hostility and rival schemes interfered ; mere 
 delayand vague postponement interfered ; and 
 it seemed likely that nothing would be done. 
 The Great Fire came to the rescue and 
 ordained that something should be clone. 
 Even then Wren did not have it all his own 
 way — what man of genius ever had whose 
 lot it was to be controlled by what is called 
 the practical mind } For example, Wren's 
 idea was to adopt a principle such as that 
 which I spoke of lately as having become an 
 aspiration in the mind of a friend of mine — 
 the principle that St. Paul's should stand in 
 clear isolation, and be seen along the river 
 from its dome to its base. It was in the 
 mind of Wren that this should be accomplished 
 by making a long line of stately quays to 
 border the Thames — by anticipating, in fact, 
 and carrying out farther down the stream the 
 idea of the Thames Embankment. But 
 Wren was not allowed to put this plan into 
 action. Houses, warehouses, and wharves 
 were permitted to crowd anyway they would
 
 WEST DOOR OF ST. PAUL S
 
 S^. Paul's 2S7 
 
 around the base of the Cathedral, and St. 
 Paul's stood as we see it standing now — or 
 rather it stood then and stands now as 
 nobody can see it, except in glimpses and 
 portions and instalments. Still, we may, if 
 we will, make some poetic association even 
 out of its present eclipsed and occulted con- 
 dition to add to that consideration which I 
 have already offered, that the neglect and 
 error of past generations has left St. Paul's to 
 have Its base in the very heart of the City's 
 life. Is it not also like some vast and stately 
 tree, some great cedar, some lofty palm, some 
 majestic outgrowth of a Sacramento forest, 
 which lifts its head and spreads its broad 
 branches away in the clear upper air, and has 
 the lowly brushwood, and the green mosses, 
 and the wild flowers, and the poor, lowly, 
 common weeds around its base ? 
 
 Edmund Burke, if I am not mistaken, 
 once had an idea that the dome of St. Paul's 
 should be gilded over, and should thus flame 
 in burnished splendour across the city like 
 some golden-roofed palace in the Arabian 
 
 s
 
 258 Charing Cross to St. Paurs 
 
 Nio/its. The matjnificence of the idea was 
 worthy of the mind of Burke. But in that 
 idea, as in others, Burke reckoned without 
 his pubHc and without his conditions. How 
 glorious it would look, that golden dome, 
 lighted up by the morning sky or burning in 
 the sunset — while the gilding- was new ! But 
 how would it be when the gilding began to 
 get old and tarnished, when the thick rain of 
 the City had blackened it as with marking- 
 ink, when the grime of the City smoke had 
 settled on it, and when only dim, defaced 
 patches here and there reminded the gazer 
 that the dome had ever borne a surface of 
 shining gold ? The gilding could be re- 
 newed, it may be said. Yes, it could be re- 
 newed ; of course it could be renewed. But 
 would it have been renewed without delay ? 
 Is it thus we find that things are managed 
 in the City and in all other communities ? 
 Would there not be delay and debate and 
 objection ? Would there not be apathy and 
 counter-project ? Would there not be dis- 
 paraging suggestion, and questions of
 
 S/. Paul's ' 259 
 
 economy and of a cheaper contract and a 
 less costly style of gilding — yellow ochre, 
 perhaps, or gamboge, laid dexterously on to 
 look as well, or nearly as well — as well in a 
 manner — as Mr. Burke's too expensive style 
 of ornamentation ? Then the gilt of the 
 dome would meanwhile begin to look shabby, 
 and thoughtless folk would gibe at it, and the 
 dome which Burke revered would become 
 the laughing-stock for men — of whom there 
 were always a few — who had not exactly 
 the intellect or the culture of Burke. And 
 Burke, too, who had read his Shakespeare 
 and appreciated him, to have made such a pro- 
 position ! Had he forgotten that often-quoted 
 line from " Troilus and Cressida" in which 
 Ulysses tells us that " One touch of nature 
 makes the whole world kin " ? Never have 
 I seen that line quoted — and I meet with the 
 quotation seven times a-week on an average 
 - — without seeing from the way in which it is 
 introduced that he who quotes it fondly and 
 firmly believes the words are used to touch 
 the heart by exalting the common qualities
 
 2 6o Charing Cross to St. Paur s 
 
 of human nature. Alas ! the kinship of 
 which Ulysses speaks is a different sort of 
 thing — it is the kinship of ignoble, mean, and 
 grovelling- instinct. The very illustration 
 Ulysses uses explains my allusion to Burke's 
 forgetfulness in not taking the lesson of those 
 lines, when he talked about oildine the dome 
 of St. Paul's. What is the touch of nature 
 that makes the whole world kin } Accordina: 
 to Ulysses, wise in his own conceit and truly 
 in the conceit of others, it is the "one con- 
 sent " with which mankind 
 
 " Give to dust tliat is a little gilt 
 More laud tlian gilt o'er-dusted." 
 
 Would not this touch of nature have 
 asserted its sway over the average public of 
 London as they passed up and clown the 
 river, mounted and descended Ludgate Hill, 
 trampeci through Cheapside eastward and 
 westward, and saw Burke's gilding on St. 
 Paul's dome o'er-dusted by the unadorning 
 and irreverent incense coming up night and 
 day from the pavements of the City '^ How
 
 Sf. Paufs 261 
 
 much of reverence would remain for Burke's 
 splendid idea when the dome was growing 
 every day more dusty and grimy ? How 
 manv men would see the idea beneath the 
 dust ? How many men would fail to prefer 
 any new garnish and glittering sight, any 
 "new-born gawd," any dust that was a little 
 gilded, to Burke's thought of the golden 
 dome ? How many men would not prefer 
 the outward show of a piece of gilt ginger- 
 bread ? It was lucky that no one really 
 thought of carrying out Burke's plan. Burke 
 himself has declared, in a passage full of 
 most melancholy and unquestionable truth, 
 that no human system can come to good 
 which is based on the heroic virtues. It is 
 of no avail to think of keeping up some 
 system which is only to be kept up on con- 
 dition that we are all and always heroic. 
 So of the fine project for the gilding of the 
 dome of St. Paul's. If gilt would only never 
 tarnish, if smoke would for ever refuse to 
 begrime a golden dome, if men would always 
 repair at once the damages of weather and
 
 262 Charing Cross to St. PatiTs 
 
 of dirt, if other men would be magnanimous 
 enough to see a great idea under an 
 occasional clouding of dust — then that gilded 
 dome mioht have been a o-rand success. But 
 smoke is smoke and soot is soot, and men 
 will gibe and see the ridiculous side of every- 
 thing — or what is to them the ridiculous side 
 — and Ulysses' touch of nature makes the 
 whole world kin, and it is well that St. Paul's 
 dome has been left ungilded. 
 
 The night comes, and St. Paul's is alone. 
 All that part of the City which approaches 
 it and environs it is now without movement 
 and life. No lights burn along Ludgate 
 Hill. The statue of Queen Anne peers down 
 that way into darkness. No windows gleam 
 in Cheapside. Bow Bells chime out after 
 midnioht to mere solitude. There is some- 
 thing particularly melancholy, inane, and 
 futile in the thought of a bell pealing out its 
 notes without even the chance to awaken 
 sleeping ears. No one lives in that part of 
 the City. That part of the City has gone 
 home to bed. It has gone to bed in Park
 
 Sf. PauFs 26 
 
 o 
 
 Lane and Piccadilly, and Belgrave Square 
 and Eaton Square ; in Norwood and Hamp- 
 stead and Clapham ; in Wood Green and 
 Brondesbury ; in Bethnal Green and Strat- 
 ford-atte-Bow ; down along the line of docks ; 
 anywhere : that City population takes in all 
 the ranks and classes of life. The Asmodeus 
 who could study the sleeping accommodation 
 of all the City folk who fiy the neighbourhood 
 of St. Paul's after dark, would have rare 
 opportunity for easy satire over the social 
 diversities of condition in London. Suppos- 
 ing he were a good-natured demon, admitting 
 in him a certain sympathy for man's distracted 
 condition between tempting possibilities and 
 cramping limitations, what would be the 
 outcome of his survey — despondency or 
 hope ? 
 
 Anyhow, the space around St. Paul's is 
 silent, clear, and lonely. The living have 
 gone. Then, perhaps, do the dead come back 
 and take their old places ? Does a Restora- 
 tion crowd stream round the base of the 
 Cathedral and admire it as it has risen from
 
 264 Charing Cross to St. PaitTs 
 
 its ruins ? Does Charles himself come with 
 his gipsy complexion and his dark love-locks ? 
 Does Nell Gwynn come smirking there ? 
 and do Evelyn and Pepys arrive arm-in-arm ? 
 Grim Prince Rupert, turned chemist and 
 chemical toy -maker in his older days, the 
 time quite gone when he could win his half 
 of any battle, is he there ? Has that greatest 
 man of his day, surpassing man of any day, 
 come from his ship-carpenter work on Tower 
 Hill, and from his drinks of brandy with 
 pepper in it— has Peter the Czar of Russia, 
 Peter the Great, wandered westward to look 
 up to the dome of St. Paul's? It would be 
 curious to think whether this revisitino- of the 
 glimpses of the moon around St. Paul's is 
 limited or not to the company of those who 
 saw the latest resurrection of the Cathedral, 
 or whether the spectres from all time or 
 nearly so, going back to the days of Roman 
 sentinels, may appear of nights on Ludgate 
 Hill, and do honour to the latest edition of 
 St. Paul's. On that question I can venture 
 no opinion. But I am firm in the conviction
 
 Sf. Pmtrs 265 
 
 that the Cathedral is never left quite alone. 
 The living surround it in the day ; the dead 
 are free of it in the night. The Monument 
 is the contemporary of its latest birth. West- 
 minster Abbey is too young to have been 
 the contemporary of its first appearance on its 
 eastern hill. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed hy R. S: R. Clark, Edhihurgh.
 
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