i ^- .:'.:.'c 1. nave ivn George A. ugus tus Sal a THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA ENDOWED BY THE DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC SOCIETIES PR5299 .32 189^ V.2 UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 00014679788 This book is due at the WALTER R. DAVIS LIBRARY on the last date stamped under "Date Due." If not on hold it may be renewed by bringing it to the library. riiC AUGi6'8g DEC 1 3 20tf Form No, 513, Rev. 1/84 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/thingsihaveseenp02sala Things I have Seen and People I have Known Thinofs I have Seen 1^ and People I have Known BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA IN TWO VOLUMES J Volume II CASSELL AND COMPANY Limited LONDON PARIS MELBOURNE 189i CONTENTS. Chapter IX. — In a IMexican Sombrero. PAGE A Mexican Costume — Travelling "Light" — ''Blue Flannel's the Thing" — Dreams of Many Lands — General Grant — A Shot from a Federal Cruiser — Havana— Vera Cruz — General Santa Anna — How he Lost his Leg — An Escort of Zouaves to Puebla — A Cauthiiere — General Almonte — Augustin I. — Juarez — Bazaine — Cavaignac — General Le Flo — The Marquis de Montholon 1 Chapter X. — Usurers of the Past. The French Usurer and his Wife — Money-lenders and their Profits — "Kite-fiying" — Loans in Kind — A Hundred and Twenty per Cent. — The Literary Money-lender — The Didactic Usurer "Mr. Thorough "—" Mr. Quasimodo" and his Breach of Promise— " My Tommy " * . 33 Chapter XI.— " Fi. Fa." and " Ca. Sa." John Doe and Richard Roe — Two Old Writs — Charles Dickens and the Troublesome Guest — Four Courses— The Old Spunging Houses — Copper Captains — ' ' Washed Out of his own Buckets " — The Whitecross Street Prison— An Out-of -Elbows Club 51 Chapter XII. — The Fast Life of the Past. Difference Between the "Fast " Life of the Present and that of the Past -The Effect of Evening Dress: A New Clothes Philo- sophy— Lord Frederick Yerisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk — vi THINGS AND PEOPLE, ' ' The Wildest Young Dog About Town ' ' — A Museum of Stolen ''Curios" — The ''Mad Marquis" and his Frolics — Gambling in Regent Street — "Greeks" — Jack Thurtell and his Victim — Arthur Thistlewood : How he Was Ruined — " Crockford's " — Superintendent Beresford and his Raids— The "Night Houses" of the Haymarket — " The Pic."— Panton Street Chapter XIII. — Pantomimes Past and Present. A Theological Professor wath a Taste for Horse-racing — An Attempt to Recall Bygone Christmases — Boxing Day, 1835 — Grue- some Curtain Raisers on Pantomime Nights — The Police in Early Days —Primitive Pantomime Tricks — A Criticism : ' ' Few Tricks, Fewer Thumps, a Singular Lack of Bumps" — The Covent Garden Pantomime in 1820 — Za-Ze-Zi-Zo-Zoo: Ani- mated Dominoes— Pi /^^7^5 du Diable in 1839 : A Run of a Thousand Nights — The Author Nicknamed — Harlequin Billy Taylor at the Princess's in 1851 — A Feline Comedy — A Change oi role Chapter XIV.— Operas Remembered. Maria di Eohan in 1847 — A Voice " like melted Butter " — Alboni — Artaxerxes — Musical Criticism in 1836 — The Lord of the Manor — Tom Thumb — The Quaker— Love in a Village — Guy Mannering — Rob Roy — The Antiquary — John Barnet, Michael Balfe, and Vincent Wallace Chapter XV. — Songs that Come Back to Me. Rossini and "the excellent M. La - da - di -da -de -da -de- day " — A Memoiy for Tunes — Arabic, Russian, and Spanish IMelodies — A Phenomenon of the Musical Memory : the Probable Ex- planation — "The Evening Gun" — French Melodies — English Ballads and Choruses — " She Wore a Wreath of Roses " and its Composer— George Linley— Lover's Ballads — Songs to be Avoided CONTENTS, vii Chapter XYI. — Pictujeies that Haunt Me. PAGE Pictures Recalled by Association — Jack Sheppard, with a Difference — Cruikshank's Presentment of the Housebreaker— A Portrait at Washington— Guido's "Beatrice Cenci " — Laying a Ghost — Valdes Leal's " Dead Prelate — Gruesome War Pictures — Jan Van Beers— The " Operating Theatre " of the Inquisition at Madrid — John Martin's Big Pictures — Hablot Knight Browne's "John Gilpin" — Turner's Paintings — Two Works in Distemper 155 Chapter XVII. — Taverns that Have Vanished. Metamorphosed Taverns — George IV. and his Works — The Making of Regent Street — Great Swallow Street — Development of Club Life— The Old White Hart, Bishopsgate Street— The Old Elephant, Fenchurch Street, and William Hogarth — The Old Dog, Holywell Street — Changing Fashions in Drinks — Business and Liquor Fifty Years Ago — The Rainbow, in Fleet Street— The Cock— Peele's Coffee House . . . .171 Chapter XVIII.— Dinners Departed and Discussed. French and English School Diet Compared — Eating Fat by Deputy — " Joe's" Chophouse in Finch Lane — Market before " Meat " — "A devilish good Dinner for Threepence -halfpenny " — The " Thirteen Cantons " — Beef d la mode — A Mysterious Sauce — A Famous Boiled Beef House in the Old Bailey — The Wait- ress and the Barrister — A Disestablished Feast— Responding for the Visitors — The Sublime Society of Steaks — An Un- spoken Speech— A Dinner at Clifford's Inn — An American Maxim 190 Chapter XIX. — Cooks of My Acquaintance. ' ' The Wretchedest of Weaklings ' '—Boy and Girl Cooks— The Potato — Prices in the Past — Concerning Omelettes — Fricour's — How to Govern a Kitchen — Verrey's — Bertolini's — Hungerford Market — The Swan Tavern and its Denizens — A Man with a Grievance and a Devourer of Crabs — A Meeting with Soyer —Madame Soyer— A " Magic Stove "—Francatelli . . 219 viii THINGS AND PEOPLE. PAGE Chapter XX. — Costumes of IMy Infancy. Boys in Petticoats — A "Skeleton Suit "—In Uniform — Schoolboy Attire — A Vanished Garment — The Carlist War and One of its Effects — A Gorgeous Costume 251 Chapter XXI.— Handwriting of My Friends. Autograph Prices — Character in Handwriting— Flourishes Classified — The Origin of a "Lasso" — Charles Dickens's "Forked Lightning" Flourish — Compliments from Lord Brougham — His Handwriting — Mr. Beresford Hope's— Mr. Walter Thorn- bury's— Thackeray's — Douglas Jerrold's— Sir Arthur Helps's — Charles Reade's — Mr. Gye's — " Hans Breitmann's " . . 266 THINGS I HAYE SEEIT AND PEOPLE I HAYE KI^OW^T, CHAPTER IX. IN A MEXICAN SOMBRERO. A Mexican Costume — Travelling " Light " — " Blue Flannels the Thing " — Dreams of Many Lands — G-eneral Grant — A Shot from a Federal Cruiser — Havana — Vera Cruz — General Santa Anna — How he Lost his Leg — An Escort of Zouaves to Puebla — A CantinVo'c — General Almonte — Augustin 1. — Juarez — Bazaine — Cavaignac — General Le Flo — The Marquis de Montholon. In my study in London, on the top of a Chat- wood's burglar-proof safe — a gift from Henry Irving — there has stood for a longtime a shallow but broad case of ebony, of which three of the sides are of glass ; and in this case is a hat — a very broad-brimmed, low-crowned article indeed, of white felt lined with crimson silk. The under- side of the brim is profusely embroidered in gold, silver, and green silk, with images of eagles sitting on nopals " — the eagle and nopal being the heraldic cognisance of Mexico. From b 2 THIXGS AND PEOPLE. that strange land I brought the hat in the year 1864. It lay for years forgotten in some obscure wardrobe-drawer, and the moths had made sad havoc with the white felt ; when, the article being accidentally discovered, it was carefully placed in a case which was hermetically sealed. I should add that by the side of this hat — known in Mexico as a sombrero galonado — there is a pudding ; " not, I hasten to explain, anything of a farinaceous or fruity kind, but such a ''pudding" as very little children used to wear round their heads in the far-off bygones, to save their skulls from injury should they chance to tumble down while essaying their first toddling. The pud- ding " to my sombrero is, in short, a padded circular cushion, hollow in the centre ; and it was placed round the crown of the hat to miti- gate to the wearer the fierceness of the sun's rays. I wore that hat for several weeks in the spring of 1864 ; and in addition I donned a dark cloth, braided, round jacket, worn open, but embellished with silver sugarloaf buttons and loops ; very wide trousers of soft leather slashed and puffed on the outer seams so as to show m A MEXICAN SOMBRERO. 3 the white linen chapareros or drawers beneath, and very large and long spurs, the rowels of which were so broad that they seemed to be emulating in their humble way the diameter of the coach- wheel " hat itself. No waistcoat, if you please ; a linen shirt with a turned-down collar, and a broad silken sash round the waist, something like the Anglo- Indian cummerbund " or Icamar-hand ; while a silk neckerchief passed through a ring, and a revolver in the hip-pocket of the trousers, com- pleted the costume. This was the garb which I habitually wore when riding on horseback in the land of the Aztecs ; and as in Mexico one is much oftener in the saddle than out of it, you may imagine that I soon grew accustomed to Mexican sumptuary ways. In journeying by diligencia, however, one wore ordinary travelling garments ; and, at dinner in Mexico city, the usual sables and white cravat of civilised life were adopted : the dress-coat being, however, oftener of alpaca than of cloth. The hat of which I have told you is in the glass case ; but in a cabinet in another room I keep the revolver and the spurs, which came b 2 4 THINGS AND PEOPLE. from a town called Amozoc, famous for the manufacture of spurs of the old Spanish pat- tern. As for the braided and silver-buttoned jacket, the soft leather trousers, the cliapareros, and the silken sash, those items were not my property ; they belonged to a kind friend long since deceased, and whom I will call Don Eustaquio, who guided me from New York to Havana, thence to Vera Cruz, and so through the mountain passes of the Cumbres to the capital of the United States of Mexico, where, at his mansion in the Calle San Francisco, as well as at his country house at Chapultepec, he entertained me with a bounteous hospitality which I shall never forget. Englishmen journeying in America are frequently advised to ''travel light" — that is to say, not to encumber themselves with too much luggage ; but, considering the distance between the Empire City and the capital of Mexico, I scarcely think that it was practicable for a civilised mortal to travel much lighter than I did. I only took with me a single and moder- ate - sized valise, containing toilet requisites, a sufficiency of linen, and a few suits of m A MEXICAN SOMBBEBO. -5 white duck and brown holland. The last I had made for me under the advice of a cautious British Foreign Office messenger, who had, in his youth, seen much military service in the West Indies. He strongly counselled the adoption of white ducks. And have them very well starched," he added ; under those circum- stances the fleas will have no purchase, and will slip off" An equally discreet New York tailor, however, suggested that a few suits of brown holland should alternate with the white ones. If you wear white from eend to eend," opined this sage, I guess you must change every day ; whereas there is at least forty-eight hours' wear in a brown-holland suit, even in the hottest of weather." But when, with what I thought justifiable pride, I exhibited my outfit to my friend the Don, he good-naturedly laughed me and my advisers to scorn. ''You should have asked me," he said, '' about a rig-out for Mexico. White ducks are no good, and brown holland is little better. Blue flannel is the thing ; it is better than serge, and better than alpaca." But it was too late. Our boat was on the shore and our bark was on the sea," and I had to get on 6 THINGS AND PEOPLE. as well as I could with my too rashly ordered outfit. More clothes than these I did not need. I was precisely of the same stature and build as my host ; and he undertook to dress me in suits of his own garments during the whole of my stay in Mexico. This offer was prompted by a very sufficient reason. Puebla had only just been stormed by the Trench Expeditionary force commanded by Marshal Bazaine ; and, although President Juarez had fled to the Rio Grande, and the French were, in a military sense, masters of Mexico, while the ill-fated Archduke Maxi- milian had been tempted by Napoleonic intrigues to abandon his beautiful domain at Miramar, near Trieste, and allow himself to be proclaimed Emperor of Mexico, the country between Vera Cruz and the metropolis swarmed with //uerrilleros, or brigands ; and the less luggage that a traveller from the coast carried with him the better. My friend, who was an enthusiastic ad- mirer of field sports and had a large stud at Chapultepec, had made extensive purchases of horses in New York ; but these animals he had sent on to Vera Cruz by a merchant IK A MEXICAN 80MBBEE0. 1 steamer ; and, to avoid embarrassing complica- tions with the Custom House, the noble steeds were supposed to represent so many four-footed members of a travelling circus, my host's stud- groom being, jjro fern., the Franconi or the Sanger in charge. If we did meet any bandits on the way, they would probably do us no harm if, when our travelling carriage happened to be attacked, no articles of much value were found in the baggage. The Mexican (/uerrilleros were rather a cowardly crew, not nearly so ferocious as the Turco-Greek brigands ; and although a traveller with little to be robbed of might not altogether verify the Latin proverb by singing in the presence of Mexican ladrones, he would not, probably, come to much grief unless he hap- pened to be some conspicuous native merchant or banker, in which case he would in all likeli- hood be held for ransom in the approved Greek, Neapolitan, and Sicilian fashion. Now, my friend happened to be distinguished both as a merchant and as a banker ; but he intended to take very good care not to allow his name to be bruited about till he got safe home. I have seen, in my time, a good many 8 l^HINGS AND FEOFLE. countries and a good many cities ; and I judge of the amount of interest which those countries and cities have excited in my mind by the pro- portionate frequency with which I dream about them. And when I speak of dreaming, be good enough to remember that you can have distinct visions of bygone scenes and people that will rise before you when you are wide awake : — walk- ing in the street, or travelling in an express train, or leaning lazily over the taffrail of a ship becalmed in the midst of the blue Pacific or the bluer Indian Ocean. You can dream vivid dreams at a public dinner, even when you are listening, perforce, to the prosing of some ancient general or admiral who is telling the Master, Wardens, and Court of Assistants of the Wor- shipful Company of Tobacco - Pipe - Stopper Makers that the military or naval services of this country are going to the deuce. Ever so many times in the course of every twelve months I dream of Eome, and Venice, and Florence ; but with much greater rarity of Milan and Genoa, and scarcely ever of Turin. As rarely do I see Paris in my visions, as rarely Madrid; but Seville and Grranada are old day IN A MEXICAN 80MBEEU0. 9 and night visitors of mine, and so are Constanti- nople and Smyrna. If ever I dream of Athens it is in a bewilderingly confused manner, in which a small Brunswick, or a miniature Dres- den, or a restricted Cassel, gets mixed up with the Acropolis and the Temple of Theseus. I try, generally with success, not to dream of Australia at all ; and I was too short a time in India, and too sick and wretched when I was there, to pre- serve any very graphic memory of that wonderful land. Ceylon, with its spice-laden breezes, comes back to me very often ; still not so often, most assuredly, as Mexico. I have but to glance at the sombrero galoiiado on the top of the safe, to take up one of the espuelas de Amozoc, to look at a little statuette of the Madonna — a Dolores with a beautiful, sorrow-stricken, im- ploring face — or at some wax figures dressed in Mexican costume, or at some pictures exquisitely worked with the brilliant feathers of tiny Mexi- can birds, to see at once, clear, sharp-cut, and many-hued, the mysterious country of Monte- zuma. I see the Cofre of Perote, the Peak of Orizaba, the long, dark cano7ies of the Cumbres, the broad belts of Tierra Caliente, teeming with 10 THINGS AND PEOPLE, tropical vegetation : — coffee and tobacco, sugar- cane, arrowroot, indigo, manioc, bananas, the cotton plant, the fan-palm, the cacao ; and then my eye stretches across vast tracts of sandy desert, relieved only by clumps of cactus and prickly pear, and now and again by grisly ruins of ancient Aztec arches and pyramids ; while in the remote background is the wondrous city of Tenostitlan itself, dominated by the snow-clad mountains half shrouded in mist, Popocatapetl and Isclascihuatl ; the first nearly 18,000ft. high. I strolled into the Camera Obscura on the West Pier at Brighton not long ago ; and there was some delay in the darkened chamber while the conductor of the show was arranging his lens. I declare that when on the adumbrated field of the circular table there should have been produced the image of the Hotel Metropole and ladies and gentle- men in European summer costume lounging in the porch of the great red-brick caravanserai, there were conjured up in my mind the two great mountains that tower over the valley of Mexico, rising suddenly out of a low range of hills ; their summits clothed with eternal snows, and IN A MEXICAN SOMBRERO. 11 their bases shrouded in dense masses of dark green pine forest. Most of us have heard of the extreme taciturnity of the late General Ulysses S. Grant. I had the honour to know that re- nowned captain, both in the States and in Europe. He was, as a rule, certainly most reti- cent of speech ; but happening to meet him one evening at dinner at the house of my old friend Mr. James Ashbury, in Eastern Terrace, Brighton, of which borough Mr. Ashbury was then one of the representatives in Parliament, I chanced to tell the General that I had sojourned for a considerable time in Mexico. He had been there, I knew, as a young officer in the United States Army during the Mexican war. He began to talk about the country, espe- cially about Popocatapetl, and he continued to discourse Avithout surcease for full twenty min- utes ; and although that which he said deeply interested me, I confess that I was slightly disenchanted when the General concluded by remarking that he guessed that there was a remunerative amount of business to be done in the way of working sulphur mines in 12 THINGS AND PEOPLE, the sides of the huge volcano. It is far from improbable that the mental vision of the two snow-clad mountains which rose before me in the dark chamber on the West Pier was ob- scurely due to the circumstance that three or four days previously I had been looking over a house in Eastern Terrace, and that I had re- membered the dinner at Mr. Ashbury's residence at which General Grant talked so long and so fluently about his Mexican experiences. A voyage to Mexico, at the period when the War of Secession in the States was at its height, was not unaccompanied by some little inconveniences, occasionally amounting to no small danger. All the ports in the Southern States, with the exception of New Orleans, which had been early captured by the Federals, were strictly blockaded ; and during our run from New York to Havana we were boarded three times by Federal gunboats, the com- mander of one of which was kind enough to fire a shot, not over, but into our bows, because our skipper did not at once obey the signal commanding us to lay-to. In fact, I think the skipper, the first oflBcer, and a select m A MEXICAN 80MBEEE0. 13 party of passengers, were playing a cheerful game of poker when the shot from the Federal cruiser came crashing into the timbers forward. It was a lieutenant from the gunboat who boarded us, and he talked at first in a very menacing man- ner ; but when our captain had conducted the gallant son of Neptune to his — the captain's own — cabin he emerged therefrom about ten minutes afterwards with an expression of perfect confi- dence and satisfaction on his manly countenance. Of course the steamer's papers had been sub- mitted to him, and found to be in proper order ; still, unless I gravely err, he had had another cause for complacency. You see, sir," ex- plained our thoughtful skipper, when these navy chaps that does the blockading want a drink of whisky, they just bear down on the first passenger steamer they sight, and overhaul her to make sure that she isn't a blockade-runner. It was right good Bourbon that I gave that leeftenant." A queer time. It was, nevertheless, quite necessary for Federal cruisers to keep the sharpest of eyes on passenger steamers hailing from New York and bound to the Gulf of Mexico. Not seldom 14 THINGS AND PEOFLE. it would happen that when the ship had been at sea a couple of days the majority of the passengers would suddenly convey to the skipper the unwelcome information that they were mili- tant Confederates ; and, after exhibiting bowie- knives, revolvers, knuckledusters, and other means of persuasion, thej^ would take command of the steamer and run her, if they could, into a Secesh port. It took us four days and a half to reach Havana ; and unluckily we did not make the coast of Cuba till after sundown, at which time the port is closed ; so we had to cruise about all night outside the harbour and under the guns of the Morro Castle. Next day, however, we landed, and abode in the capital of Cuba for a whole week. Havana, I have been told, has consider- ably altered — and for the better, I hope — since the spring of 1864. The fortifications of the town had only just been demolished, and broad suburban promenades were being formed. The hotels were altogether Spanish — that is to say, extremely vile. Slavery still existed, and beggars abounded. There was plenty, however, to be seen and to be admired, especially the great IN A MEXICAN SOMBB.EBO. 15 Tacon Opera House — the Scala, one may almost say, of the Spanish West Indies, at which vast theatre I found SiS prima donna assoliita an old and esteemed friend of mine, Madame Gruerrabella, who has sung under that name and with great applause in England, but who is better known to modern playgoers as the accomplished traffS- dienne, Miss Grenevieve Ward. Of course one could not leave the Pearl of the Antilles without paying a visit to the great cigar manufactory, the Real Fabrica de Tabacos " of the " Hija de Cabanas y Carvajal." The firm were kind enough to present me with what is known in Spanish as an obsequio, in the shape of fifty of the very choicest regalias imperiales in a glass casket richly framed with gilt metal. I came upon the casket, much battered and shattered, a few weeks since in a lumber-room ; and I wondered how many thousands of Cabanas I have smoked since March, 1864 ! A few days' steaming in another ship took us to Vera Cruz, then a hot, dusty, bustling, and I should say fearfully malarious place, with no regular harbour, but only an open roadstead with a kind of natural breakwater in the rock. 16 THINGS AND PEOPLE. crowned by the mediseval castle of San Juan de Ulloa. We did not anchor under the lee of that fortress half an hour too soon ; for almost imme- diately after our arrival there sprang up what in these latitudes is called a Norte: a storm the cousin-german of which, in amusing accordance with the rule of contraries, is known on the Australian shores of the Pacific as a Southerly Buster." The sky is blue, the sea is calm, the sun shines brightly ; when on a sudden a black spot is visible just above the horizon. It grows ; it swells into a tremendous rain-cloud ; it bursts. The wind begins to howl ; the sky becomes inky black ; and the sea is lashed into one seething, heaving mass of white foam. In the case of a Norte, the prudent master-mariner eschews even the open roadstead of Vera Cruz, changes his course, and makes a run for the adjacent port of Sacrificios. Vera Cruz in 1864 bore the strangest of aspects. There were several French men-of-war in the harbour ; and immediately you landed you found yourself surrounded by military natives of la Belle France, mingled with more or less ragged Mexicans in striped serapes or blankets IJSr A MEXICAN SOMBRE BO. 17 and coach wheel hats ; swarbhy women with ribosos or mantles of black cloth or silkily fine cotton drawn over their heads — the Mexican sub- stitute for the mantilla of Old Spain — together with shovel-hatted priests, muleteers, half-castes, Indians, mendicants, and dogs innumerable. The narrow and dirty streets of the town were patrolled by droves of zopilotes — black vultures of the turkey-buzzard genus, which hopped about unmolested in the open and pestiferous gutters; in fact, their vast capacity for devouring carrion had caused the zopilotes to be placed under the immediate protection of the police. The obscene creatures were, indeed, the only scavengers of Vera Cruz in my time — and they were no doubt very useful in freeing the town of some of its most revolting features. Still, for all the vultures could do, the place had a hor- rible smell ; and it was difficult to converse for five minutes with a native without reference being made to the far from fascinating subject of the vomito, or yellow fever, which was per- manently domiciled there. Add to the evil odours and the carrion- birds the presence of myriads of sand-fiies and mosquitos, and you c 18 THINGS AND PEOPLE. may imagine that my first impressions of the land of Montezuma were not very exhilarating. But my friendly Don bade me be of good cheer, and assured me that when we reached a higher level and emerged into the valley of Mexico I should find myself in one of the most delightful countries and climates in the world. And he spoke the truth. I should add that in addition' to French troops of every branch in the Imperial service, there were quartered at Vera Cruz two re- giments of Egyptian soldiers — coal-black Nubians in white uniforms and red fez caps, who had been lent — for a consideration, I suppose — to the Em- peror Napoleon III. by the Pasha of Egypt — not then known as Khedive. These sable warriors were mostly of gigantic stature ; and I was in- formed that excellent discipline was maintained in their ranks : the chief means of preserving it being that when a soldier did not do as he was ordered, his oflicer straightway proceeded to fell him to the earth with his sabre — it is to be hoped, with the blunt edge of the weapon. My sojourn in Mexico brought me in contact with a large number of celebrated people. There was, to begin with, Don Antonio Lopes iiY A MEXICAN SOMBRERO. 19 de Santa Anna. The intercolonial steamer on board which I was a passenger picked up the ex-President of the Mexican Eepublic at St. Thomas — that pleasant little island with its white houses with green verandahs and bright red roofs — where the General had a country house, and solaced himself during exile by the diversion of cock-fighting. The General was coming to Mexico to offer his services to the Emperor Maximilian — and perhaps with a view towards his own personal interests, in which he had always manifested the liveliest concern — and was accompanied by liis wife, whose personal m- pedimenta, comprising several enormous trunks of the pattern known to the Spaniards as mimdos — worlds — a parrot in a cage, several lapdogs, and a guitar, almost filled the boat in which her Excellency was conveyed to the steamer. Santa Anna himself was, in 1864, a hale old gentleman of sixty-six ; he wore a glossy, curly, brown wig, very much resembling the historic peruke assumed by his Majesty King George IV., as you behold him in Sir Thomas Lawrence's full-length portrait of the First Gentleman in Europe in the full robes of the Garter; nor c2 20 THINGS AND PEOPLE. were the Mexican warrior and statesman's high white cravat and stand-up shirt-collars altogether unlike those worn, in the portrait of which I have spoken, by the Fourth George. For the rest, Sauta Anna was attired in a blue body-coat with gilt buttons, a formidable shirt-frill of the pouter-pigeon " pattern, nankeen waistcoat and pantaloons, with a great bunch of seals pendant from the fob which contained his watch. He had a wooden leg ; and I think he told me, after 1 had been presented to him by my friend the Don, who knew him very well, that he had lost the limb during the bombard- ment of Vera Cruz by the French in 1839 : and that the surgical department of the Mexican army being at the time somewhat defective, his leg had been amputated by a local butcher. Santa Anna's complexion was pink and white, although he was Mexican born, but of unmixed Spanish descent. He came of an ancient Castilian house, a cadet of which had emigrated to New Spain ; and his earlier feats of arms had been in defence of the Spanish Monarchy against the partisans of independence. But he speedily threw in his m A MEXICAN SOMBRERO. 2L lot with the patriots ; and for twenty years was one of the most conspicuous personages in Mexican politics, and became President of the Eepubhc and Dictator over and over again ; his tenures of power alternating with long periods of banishment. He was full of anecdote, and, I should say, was, on the whole, about as crafty an old fox as ever looted a henroost or doubled when the hounds were close upon him. But the Trench, when we arrived at Vera Cruz, would have nought to do with Don Antonio Lopes de Santa Anna. The comman- dant of the garrison, with three aides-de-camp, all very brave in white puggrees floating in the breeze, boarded us so soon as we were under the guns of the castle of San Juan de Ulloa, and politely but firmly communicated to General Santa Anna the positive orders of General Bazaine, that he — the ex-Dictator — was not to be allowed to land on Mexican soil. So, with the Senora, his spouse, and her multifarious belongings, the ex-Dictator transferred him- self to another steamer bound direct for St. Thomas. I must now mention that my hospitable Don's 22 THINGS AND PEOPLE. hopes of not being recognised until liis arrival in Mexico city were frustrated. We purposely avoided going to a fonda, or hotel ; but re- paired instead to the house of a mercantile correspondent of my friend, where, like Brer Eabbit, we lay low " for a few days ; but it oozed out, somehow or another, that the senior partner in the great banking-house of the city of Mexico was in Vera Cruz ; and ere long we heard that the tidings had reached the mala gente, or brigands, who were making active pre- parations to seize our party and hold us to ransom. The giieriUeros, notwithstanding all the vigilance of the French, were swarming in the Cumbres, and an exceptionally audacious bandit, whose sobriquet was ''El Aguador " — the water-carrier — had made no secret of his intention to kidnap Don Eustaquio and his com- panions. For the Don he meant to ask, he said, a ransom of $50,000. Tliere was in his company, added '' El Aguador," another person — an Eng- lishman, whose name he could not gather, but who was fat. For JEl Gordo, the corpulent traveller, he should demand a ransom of $2,000. Take physic, pomp ! Here was a rascally Mexi- JiY A MEXICAN 80MBRER0. 23 can highwayman, who not only alluded uncom- plimentarily to my personal appearance, but contemptuously appraised me at the pitiful price of £400 sterling. Thus, we waited at Vera Cruz until the commandant of the garrison of Puebla, who was a French general of division, could be communicated with ; and he very obligingly placed a company of French Zouaves at our disposition as an escort as far as Puebla ; promising us another escort — of cavalry, if pos- sible — from that city to the capital. The Zouaves were accommodated in a couple of large omnibuses, not only filling the interior, but crowding the roofs of those vehicles ; and I am happy to remember that the gallant warriors in the baggy red breeches and the white turbans were accompanied by a French canliniere, who was under orders to join the headquarters of her regiment in Mexico city. A merrier, wittier, saucier, kindlier-hearted little lady in short skirfc, scarlet continuations, and white canvas gaiters I never met. She eschewed the regimental turban, and wore a sailor s hat covered with black oilskin^ rakishly set on one side of her curly brown head. The soldiers treated her with chivalric respect ; 24 THINGS AND PEOPLE, for tlie poor little soul was a widow with two children. Her husband, who was a sergeant, had been killed at Magenta. She had been in the Crimea, too, and expressed great surprise that the English regiments at Balaclava had no vivandih^es — nothing in that line, indeed, save a ' lady of dark complexion who kept an everything store at Balaclava, and whom she called La Mere Cicol — I suppose she meant that respectable West Indian universal provider, Mrs. Seacole, who did so much to minister to the well-being of our gallant soldiers in the Tauric Chersonese. Altogether, the little French cantiniere whose husband was slain at Magenta has not ceased to shine as a very bright spot in my memory. From top to toe, in mien and speech, she was the counterpart of Beranger's sutler. Soldats, voila Catin ! " I saw her afterwards on the march with her regiment ; and she looked more like Beranger's heroine than ever — alert, saucy, confident, brave, as was her ancestress when she marched into Vienna, into Berlin, into Madrid, into Moscow. So, with the aid of the two omnibuses full of Zouaves, we reached the capital in safety, and a m A MEXICAN SOMBEEEO. 25 very few days after our arrival my friendly Don took me to the Palace and presented me to General Don Juan Nepomucene Almonte, who was Regent of Mexico, or Chief of the Provi- sional Grovernment, fulfilling all the duties of a chief magistrate until the arrival of the Emperor Maximilian. Almonte was a gentleman of tniddle stature, slight of limb, and extremely swarthy, even to the colour of copper, in complexion. He was altogether a remarkable man, being, in fact, the son of the famous Cur a Morelos, one of the most conspicuous of the patriots who fought for Mexican independence. His mother was a full- blooded Indian ; and the story was current that the bellicose curate's son derived his name of Almonte from the circumstance of his sire, at the moment of departure on one of his adventurous expeditions, being accustomed to say to his wife and the nurse who carried the infant, M niTzo al ynonte — the child to the hills ; the densely- wooded mountain ranges being the habitual refuge, in troublous times, of women and child- ren. Morelos was captured and shot by the Eoyalists ; and his young son escaped to N^ew Orleans, where a generous French Creole lady 26 THIlSrGS AND PEOPLE. adopted him, had him thoroughly educated, and would have set liim up in business as a merchant ; but the youth preferred to return to his native country, to which he was recalled in company with other Mexican exiles by the unlucky Em- peror Iturbide. His life had been one continual fever of agitation and intrigue ; but his educa- tion had stood him in good stead, inasmuch as he had been repeatedly despatched on diplomatic missions to London, to Paris, and to other Euro- pean capitals. He spoke English and French fluently, and retained a lively and favourable remembrance of Lord Palmerston and of Lord Clarendon. The palace of which I speak is a long range of stone or adobe buildings, of no great altitude, but of immense extent ; and the edifice is inter- esting as standing on the exact site of the palace of the ill-fated Montezuma. It occupies one side of the great Plaza of the city, to your right as you emerge from the long street which runs right through the town ; and although the topography of Mexico has in the course of nearly four centuries undergone many changes, the student of Prescott will without much difficulty m A MEXICAN SOMBBEBO. 27 recognise the similarity between the structural arrangements of the modern city and those so inimitably described by the American his- torian. The great pyramidal temple of Tenos- titlan has been replaced by an imposing Eoman Catholic cathedral, which fronts you as you enter the Plaza from the street just named. It is a splendid pile, which was begun so far back as 1573, and was not completely finished until 1791 ; but on one side of this magnificent fane there remains the great sacrificial stone of the ancient Aztecs. The cathedral faces you from the north ; the whole south side of the Plaza is occupied by the Portal, or market, the arcades of which are heaped high with all kinds of pro- ducts and miscellaneous ware, including large quantities of characteristic native pottery, and which seem to be frequented at all hours by in- numerable swarms of people of both sexes and all ages — white, half-castes, and Indians ; the women in ribosos, the men mainly draped in serapes. The attractions of the Portal were en- hanced by a number of little gambling-tables held by crafty-looking men, at which you could play at the national and fascinating game of 28 THINGS AND PEOPLE. monte, either for doubloons or omas de oro, or for clacos or coppers. The mention of the name of Iturbide re- minds me — first, that the only commonly decent hotel in the Mexico which I remember was the Fonda Iturbide ; and next, that I was introduced to two middle-aged gentlemen, who were the sons of the unfortunate Emperor just named. The elder Iturbide had begun his career, like Santa Anna, by fighting in the Eoyal army against the patriots ; but he subsequently joined the Independence party, and w^as mainly instrumental in driving the Spaniards out of the country. The victorious General unwisely allowed himself to be elected Emperor of Mexico, and took the title of Augustin I. Naturally he was, in process of time, overthrown and banished ; and as naturally, when he returned to Mexico, the faction in power tried him for treason and shot him. Mexicans of all shades of opinion have, however, been unanimous in acclaiming Iturbide as the greatest of their countrymen. His remains were interred with great pomp in the Cathedral of Mexico ; his sword is preserved as a precious relic in the Chamber of Deputies ; IN A MEXICAN SOMBEEEO. 29 and the two middle-aged gentlemen whom I knew were in receipt of pensions from the Grovernment, which stipends, wonderful to relate, had always been paid with punctuality. Of the two brethren I only preserve a distinct recollection of Don Augustin, who was celebrated for one rather remarkable quality. He was con- sidered to be the only cahallero in Mexico city who could drink a bottle of dry sherry without turning a hair. The devotees of temperance ^ might clap their hands in ecstasy could they take note of the abstemiousness which prevails among the upper classes in the city of Monte- zuma. Champagne and light claret and a very little pure sherry make their appearance at high- class dinner tables ; but the air, owing to the great altitude of the plateau on which the city stands, is so excessively rarefied that you seem to be in a state of continual finger-snapping and head-tossing elation, and you require only homoeopathic quantities of alcohol. On the other hand, the Indian population will get tipsy, whenever they have the opportunity of doing so, on the national beverage, pulque, a vinous liquor obtained by fermenting the juice 30 THINGS AND FEOPLE. of the various species o£ the agave. It looks like biitter-milk, it smells like rotten eggs, and it tastes like cider that has gone very wrong indeed. The Indians are passionately fond of it. The country, just prior to the arrival of Maximilian of Hapsburg, was in the strangest condition. Mexico, Puebla, and Vera Cruz were completely under the military control of the French ; but in the interior states the Ee- publican party was far from being annihilated. Ex-President Benito Juarez, with a diminished following, had been slowly driven back to Zacatecas ; still he continued to protest that he alone represented the Xational Government, and Greneral Bazaine was unable to destroy him — a term so frequently used by the Grreat Duke during the Waterloo campaign with refer- ence to Napoleon Bonaparte. That conqueror our Wellington certainly did destroy " ; but Juarez lived to fight another day, to murder, judicially, the unhappy Maximilian, and to become once more President of Mexico. I deeply regret that I never encountered Don Benito Juarez — a most remarkable little copper- coloured man. He was known in Mexico as IN A MEXICAN SOMBRERO. 31 El Indio, and had, I believe, very little, if any, Spanish blood in his veins. He was of very humble extraction ; but, by the sheer force of indefatigable industry and sedulous study, added to great natural gifts, had got himself called to the Bar, and prior to his election as Chief Magistrate of the Eepublic, he had been President of the Supreme Court of Mexico. I mentioned General (afterwards Marshal) Bazaine just now, to whom I was presented by his kins- man, a young captain of infantry, who was generally known as Le Petit Bazaine/' The General struck me as neither more nor less intelli- gent than the average of French officers of rank with whom I have had the privilege to converse. Pelissier, Forey, Leboeuf, and Bosquet all seemed to have been turned out of the same mould ; and all struck me as being very brave, hearty, but somewhat dense gentlemen; but Lamoriciere had something of the patrician and the chivalrous about him ; and Cavaignac was a general officer of decided character and marked political as well as military ability. General Le Fib I met in St. Petersburg, where he was Ambassador, in 1876. He was 32 THINGS AND PEOPLE. a most amusing, energetic warrior-diplomatist, who had been, I should say, both a lady- killer and a fire-eater in his youth. He was never tired of inveighing against the hopeless deterioration of French statesmen ; and, on the whole, he reminded one somewhat forcibly of General Boum in La Grande Dicchesse, One more personage of importance I may mention among the people whom I met in Mexico. This was the Marquis de Montholon, whom I had known as French Consul-Greneral of New York ; but who, when a shadowy crown was placed on the brow of an Austrian Grand Duke, was despatched as Minister Plenipotentiary to Mexico. He was either the son or the near kinsman of General Montholon, the devoted adherent of the first Napoleon, who accompanied his fallen master to St. Helena, and remained there until the death of the exile of Longwood. 33 CHAPTEE X. - USURERS OF THE PAST. The French Usurer and his Wife — Money-lenders and their Profits — " Kite-flying" " — Loans in Kind — A Hundred and Twenty per Cent. — The Literary Money-lender — The Didactic Usurer — "Mr. Thorough" — "Mr. Quasimodo" and his Breach of Promise — '* My Tommy." I SUPPOSE that there have been money-lenders ever since the time when gold, silver, copper, leather, or tin was recognised as a circulating medium ; and almost as old as the hills are the stories of the extortions of usurers. I was reading, a while ago, in a little sixteenth- century Book of Jests, how a French usurer, coming home to his wife after the transactions of the day, told her that he had done a very good stroke of business ; inasmuch as he had lent the sum of six hundred livres to a young gentleman for a term of one year at fifty per cent, interest; had deducted the in- terest in advance, and consequently had dis- bursed only three hundred livres in hard cash. " You fool ! " replied his better half, you d 34 THINGS AND PEOPLE. ought to have lent liim the money for two years, deducting two years' interest ; and then you would not have had to part wdth an}^ cash at all."' The story may be, for aught I know, in Joe Miller ; or it may have come from the ''Book of the Sixty " in Old Athens; or it may possibly be recited in hieroglyphics on the oldest of Egyptian obelisks. Still, what- ever may be the origin of the little aj)ologue, it points to the universal belief that money-lenders are the very hardest of persons with whom it is possible to do business ; and that if they were not the most rapacious of extortioners, they would never enrich themselves. I have seen a good deal of usurers in my day, and, generally sjDeaking, have been on amicable terms with many shining lights of the money- lending fraternity : but, strange to say, I have been led, after man}' years' experience of them, to the opinion that money-lenders, as a rule, do not acquire very great wealth. Some twenty years ago, a then very well-known bill-discounter, one of the good old sixty per cent, fraternity, in- cidentally observed to me, People are quite mistaken in thinkins: that we make such a USURERS OF THE PAST. 35 tremendous pile of money out of stamped paper at three months. My dear sir, I can assure you, on my word of honour, that when I balance my books, every Good Friday, I think myself lucky if the}^ show an all-round profit of ten per cent." Bacon, in his Essay on Eiches, says that usury is the certainest means of gain, though one of the worst ; " yet the illustrious philosopher is fain to qualify his assertion as to the certainty of the usurer's gains when he proceeds to say that the money-lender's trade has flaws ; for that the scriveners and brokers do value unsound men to serve their turn." There it is. Emboldened by the facility with which he has eaten up innumerable herds of small deer, the usurer imagines that it will be as easy for him to devour some huge Monarch of the Glen — with a coronet perchance on one of the tynes of his antlers — but the giant may turn out, in the long run, to be merely a Colossus of Insolvency ; and the disconsolate usurer finds that he has only been throwing away his money. Be it as it may, I have not known many bill- discounters who have realised exceptionally large fortunes. I have heard, it is true, of two or d2 36 THINGS AND PEOPLE. three millionnaires in the kite-flying line ; but, on the contrary, I have been aware of a considerable number of once prominent money- lenders Avho have either retired from that peculiar branch of business, to take up some other avoca- tion, or who have gone to dire and irremediable smash. Again, it strikes me that there are not a quarter so many professional usurers at present as was formerly the case; and that kite-flying," or, to use a less figurative term, dealing in ac- commodation bills, is a financial operation rapidly declining. Whether the Public Offices are yet haunted by Harpagons of the insatiably ravenous type depicted with inimitable humour in the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope, I have no precise means of judging ; still, I should say that the practice of kite-flying " on a comparatively small scale — the security being merely the signa- tures of the drawer, acceptor, and endorser of the bits of stiff " — is not by any means so prevalent as it was thirty years since. Scores or hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling may still be lent to prodigal sons by a very few usurers on a larger scale ; but my Lord Eakewell has usually some USUEEBS OF THE PAST. 37 tangible security to offer, in the shape of land or reversions of property. The money-lenders whom I remember in the past were quite con- tent to do business on a strictly kite-flying basis/' and perhaps the Debtors' Act of 1869, which, although it did not entirely abolish im- prisonment for debt, sufficed to empty and render useless all the debtors' prisons in London, had a great deal to do with reducing the traffic in accommodation bills. When the maximum of the duration of imprisonment for a debt was fixed at six weeks, the bill-discounting creditor felt that he was bereaved of one of his most cherished privileges — that of keeping his debtor in gaol for an indefinite term of years. The abolition of the purchase system in the .army may furthermore have conduced to the discouragement of the once flourishing trade of doing bits of stiff*." So long as a commission in her Majesty's service was a saleable article, the impecunious- subaltern could always borrow. But the disestablishment and demolition of the Fleet, the Bench, and Whitecross Street prisons, were more immediately instrumental in bringing about the decline, if not the fall, of the accom- 38 THimS AND PEOPLE. modation bill. A Father of the Marshalsea " is at the present day happily an impossibility. I must frankly admit that, although my acquaint- ance with bill-discounters goes back to the very early 'fifties, the bill-discounters who are de- scribed in Samuel Warren's Ten Thousand a Year," and in Charles Lever's early Irish and military novels, flourished before my time. Most of us have read about the wheeled vehicle which a Dublin bill-discounter made his customers ac- cept as an equivalent for part of the sum which he lent them, and which had returned to him and gone through so many hands that it came at last to be known as ''the discount dennet." Then there was the Trapbois, who forced his victims to take a portion of their loans in pic- tures by the Old Masters, or percussion-muskets from the Tower, or bird-of-paradise and humming- bird skins, or models in ivory of the old Teme- raire. Wine, too, was very frequently foisted on the acceptor of a bill, to the extent of fifty per cent, of the sum theoretically advanced, and I once had a friend who, getting a " kite " flown for a hundred pounds, received twenty-five pounds in cash and the balance in leather." What he USUBEBS OF THE PAST. 39 did with the hides, or whether the leather con- sisted of saddles, bridles, portmanteaus, or lug- gage straps, I do not know. There were, of course, as there may be still to a restricted extent, monej^-lenders and money- lenders. There were fashionable West End tailors who would advance thousands to cus- tomers whom they thought to be safe," and crapulous money-spinners who turned over, so to speak, only shillings and pence, but who, on the whole, made far fewer bad debts than their fashionable congeners did. About Clare Market and the streets surrounding Lincoln's Inn, there used to hang, some forty years ago, money- lenders akin to those pests and curses to the French peasant, the iisuriers a la petite semaine. Their vocation was to advance small sums, rarely exceeding five pounds, to temporarily necessitous tradespeople : the loan being generally for a week, and never exceeding a fortnight ; the transaction being effected, not by a bill of exchange or pro- missory note, but simply by I 0 U. The interest which these benevolent assistants of struggling traders exacted would be nearer, I should say, a hundred and twenty than the proverbial sixty per 40 THINGS AND PEOPLE. cent., and their business was, in the main, I ap- prehend, a remarkably lucrative one ; since they dealt with persons who were continually in receipt of ready money, and who were, as a rule, ready and able to repay small loans ; although indebtedness to any large amount w^ould surely have driven them into bankruptcy. One of these hebdomadal money-lenders advanced cash ex- clusively to small undertakers ; another devoted his attention especially to butchers ; and a third was the beneficent genius of widows who kept small chandlers' shops. Then there was the literary money-lender — a sympathising soul whose professed object in life was to minister to the necessities of young authors, for whom he always predicted a swift rise to fame and fortune. He was no advertising usurer, oh dear no ; but he wrote you affec- tionate and strictly confidential letters, signed A Retired Bookseller," and asking for an in- terview. Eventually you found out that his name was, we will. say, Skinemalive. Hew^as the most obliging creature in the world, in the way of renewing bills Avhen they became due ; and by the time you had had, say, thirty USURERS OF THE PAST. 41 pounds in solid money from him, you found that you owed him on stamped paper at least a hundred. He was a rare rogue. Another type of the bland and almost pathetic usurer was a gentleman long since deceased, whom I may call the didactic bill-discounter. He had an office somewhere near Leicester Square ; and he entertained you with high- flown discourse while the little formalities in- cidental to getting ''a bit of stiff" done were being transacted by his clerks. He was curiously well read in Pope, and occasionally even favoured his clients with quotations from Paradise Lost," while his epistolary style was based on Dr. Johnson s Eambler" and Idler"; his loftiest sentences, however, being enlivened by touches of his own peculiar humour. Sir," he once wrote to a friend of mine, the pressing entreaties you make for additional time being ex- tended to you, for the discharge of the debt and costs for which I have obtained judgment against you, have not the ring of true remorse. They rather resemble the shriek of the impenitent malefactor in his cell, on the evening prior to his execution ; and I intend to have all your molar 42 THINGS AND PEOPLE. teeth to-morrow." That which the didactic bill- discounter intended to do, he generally did — and with a vengeance. Somewhere in a street off the Strand, be- tween Waterloo Bridge and the Adelphi, there flourished, when I was quite a young man, another facetious usurer whom I will call Mr. Thorough — he did things so very completely. He had a front office and a back office, the last his own private sanctum, which was, so far as I re- collect, devoid of any furniture except the bureau at which he sat, an iron safe, a couple of chairs, and a hanging bookshelf, on which reposed an Army List, a Navy List, a Clergy List, and Boyle's Court Guide." His humour was pecu- liar. When you called upon him with some stamped paper which you were anxious to get discounted, his first proceeding was to unlock a drawer, take out his cheque-book, flourish it in your sight, replace the book in the drawer, lock it, and then, putting liis hands in his pockets, cheerfully address you in this wise : Well, my buck ; and what might you want with me ? " You replied that you wanted a bill discounted. Impossible ! There was no money in London — usuhees of the past. 43 absolutely no money in London. Still/' lie would continue on being further pressed, there will be no harm in taking just a peep at the young 'un. Has she got the names of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England on her back ? " He always spoke of an accommodation bill as a feminine entity. Then he would send for his clerk, ''to see how his account stood at the bank." He doubted whether he had as much as ten pounds balance. He did" the bill, eventually, and remarkably stiff interest he charged ; but it took, so you thought, an immensity of time before Mr. Thorough could be persuaded to unlock the drawer again and sign the much-desiderated cheque. After that he would once more put his hands in his pockets, whistle, and cheerily in- quire whether it was at Richmond or at Green- wich that you meant to take the little party in the pink bonnet to dinner, that same afternoon. Oh ! he was very thorough ; for while he was conversing with you his solicitor, who had an office above, had prepared something of the nature of a cognovit or confession of debt and consent that judgment should be entered up 44 THINGS AND PEOPLE. against you. This document you signed ; so that if the bill was not paid at maturity, Mr.. Thorough could at once obtain execution ag^ainst vou, thus saving himself the trouble of having to serve you with a writ and sue you in due form. I had a brief acc[uaintance, also, with one usurer — one of the class defined by Bacon as cruel moneyed men" — who had an odd jje/ic/ianf for making little presents of an edible nature to his clients. Now it was pickled tunny, now dried sprats from Xorway, now clotted cream from Devonshire. But he sued you nevertheless, ruthlessly. These brief reminiscences of bygone money- lenders would be sadly incomplete were I to omit mention of two notable specimens of tlie race, both dead and g^one these manv vears. Let me summon from the inmost recesses of my memory a truly curious personage indeed, whom I will call Mr. Quasimodo. He was scrupulously par- ticular as to his personal appearance, and always dressed in glossy broadcloth of raven hue ; and in the centre of his spotless lawn shirt-front listened a larofe diamond solitaire. His hat was very tall and ver}^ shiny, and was alwaj^s encircled with a sliallow crape hat-band; but, on USURERS OF THE PAST. 45 being interrogated as to what bereavement he had recently undergone, he would return evasive answers ; and it was generally understood by Mr. Quasimodo's intimates that the sign of mourning was a general and not a particular one, and that he wore it in sorrowful remem- brance of clients who had fled to Boulogne, or who had passed through the Court for the Eelief of Insolvent Debtors. He wore the nattiest little black kid gloves imaginable ; and he was shod with unimpeachably elegant boots of French kid with varnished toes. The only thing which he needed to complete his engaging aspect was, say, a couple of feet in height ; for, to tell the truth, Mr. Quasimodo was a dwarf. His physical shortcomings stood him once in unexpectedly good stead. Mr. Quasi- modo — who was about fifty when I knew him — was by no means insensible to the tender passion ; and on one occasion a handsome but wily widow brought an action against him for breach of promise of marriage : he being, as it happened, a very much married man, with a wife as tall as a Life Guardsman and two strap- ping daughters. The case was tried before 46 THINGS AND PEOPLE, Mr. Justice Martin; and Mr. Quasimodo's leading counsel was that once highly popular advo- cate, Mr. Serjeant Wilkins, who, after reading his brief, told the defendant that the case was one that must be ''bounced" through. And the Serjeant did bounce it through in a truly remarkable manner. '' Grentlemen of the jury," he said, at the close of a most eloquent speech, in which he endeavoured to persuade the twelve honest men in the box that they were about the most intelligent and most patriotic jurymen that had ever been empanelled since the Trial of the Seven Bishops, you have heard the evidence for the plaintiff ; and, gentlemen of the jury, you have seen and admired that most bewitching plaintiff herself. Gentlemen, do you believe that this enchanting, this fascinating, this capti- vating, this accomplished lady would, for one moment, favour the advances or listen with any- thing save scorn and indignation to the amorous protestations of the wretched and repulsive homunculiis, the deformed and degraded de- fendant ? " Mr. •Quasimodo looked up from the well of the court and piteously murmured, " Mr. Serjeant Wilkins ! Oh, Mr. Serjeant Wilkins !" USURERS OF THE PAST. 47 Silence, sir ! " replied the Serjeant, in a wrath- ful undertone. Gentlemen," he continued, bringing his fist down heavily on the desk before him, do you think that this lovely lady, this fair and smiling creature, would ever have permitted an offer of marriage to be made to her b}^ this deplorable atom of humanity, this stunted deformity, 7v/io woidd have to stand on a sheet of notepaper to JooJc over twopence The jury at once gave a verdict for the defendant. Mr. Quasimodo's exiguity of stature was as- suredly no fault of his ; still, it must be mourn- fully conceded that, so far as the discounting of bills went, a more flagitious little villain rarely existed. He came to deserved grief at last ; and after an interview with the magistrate at a police-court, and making some very complicated arrangements to repair certain wrongs which he was accused of having done, he retired from the kite-flying line of business, and subsided into private life, from which he did not emerge until the period of his decease. A very different type of the bill-discounter was My Tommy." He was a solicitor who at one time had been in considerable practice ; but 48 THINGS AND PEOPLE. who, having realised a considerable fortune, turned his attention to dealing in bills. When I first became acquainted with My Tommy/' he was reputed to be worth at least eighty thousand pounds. He dwelt in a handsome house at the West End, where he gave excellent dinners, with copious liquid accessories in the shape of admirable dry champagne and rare old port. So, you may remind me, did Ealph Nickleby give dinners at his house in Grolden Square ; but the Nickleby banquets were exclu- sively discount dinners ; while My Tommy's " were really prompted by his own profuse hospi- tality, and love of good company and sparkling conversation. Whether any of his guests, whom I used to meet at his well-spread board, were in his debt, was a matter between My Tommy " and themselves ; but he was always the cheer- fullest and most generous of hosts, and one fore- gathered at his table with all kinds of legal, political, and literary notabilities. I first met the late Mr. Isaac Butt, M.P., at ^^My Tommy's"; and Mr. Commissioner Murphy was one of his most constant visitors. My Tommy " was a little man, but he had a most symmetrical figure, USUBEUS OF THE FAST, 49 and would have looked very well indeed in black silk shorts and stockings. He was quite con- scious of the symmetry of his lower limbs, which he was wont to say with smiling complacency, were as ''fine as a fawn's." In matters of busi- ness, however, My Tommy was the sharpest of sharp practitioners. It was he who, when a body of four Government clerks waited on him one forenoon, three of their number being re- spectively the drawer, acceptor, and indorser of a " bit of stiff," inquired whether the young gentleman who was looking out of the window wouldn't like to jump up behind." The young gentleman who was looking out of the window was not in any way concerned in the negotiation of the bill, and consequently he did not see his way towards ''jumping up behind," or giving an additional endorsement to the document to be discounted. " My Tommy's " prosperity did not continue to the period of his death. Very late in life, and most unfortunately for himself, he came into possession of a racing stud, his acquisition of which I suppose had some kind of connection with bills. " My Tommy " went on the turf ; and he lost, I am afraid, all his money. e 50 THINGS AND PEOPLE. He was not altogether friendless in his declining years ; and among the usurers that I have known My Tommy " was certainly the least rapacious and the warmest-hearted. 51 CHAPTER XI. "FI. FA." AND ''CA. SA." John Doe and Richard Roe — Two Old Writs — Charles Dickens and the Troublesome Guest— Four Courses — The Old Spunging Houses — Copper Captains — "Washed Out of his own Buckets" — The Whitecross Street Prison — An Out-of-Elbows Club. Are there any students of legal antiquities, I may ask, who mourn the disappearance of time- honoured — or dishonoured — processes and usages from our system of civil jurisprudence ? Nero's nurse, together with a lady of somewhat light reputation, wept, we all know, for the dead despot, collected his worthless remains, and gave them decent sepulture ; but are there any elderly persons who, being cognisant of what was the state of the law of debtor and creditor, say, fifty- five years ago, feel inclined to drop a tear, or even to heave a soft sigh over the tombs of de- parted processes and pleas of the British Themis ? Having occasion, the other day, to consult a quite up-to-date handy book on the Principles of Law and Equity, purporting to be compiled for e 2 52 THINGS AND PEOPLE. the purpose of saving laymen the trouble and expense of consulting a solicitor in trifling matters, I was mournfully surprised to find that although the writ of Fieri Facias had a place in the index, no mention whatever w^as made therein of the more formidable process of Capias ad Satisfaciendimi. With equal grief and be- wilderment did I also note the absence of those very early friends of mine, John Doe and Ei chard Eoe. The younger generation of readers may even ask who J ohn Doe and Eichard Eoe were ; but I believe that I am right in stating that Doe and Eoe were the leading characters in a merry little farce called ''Legal Fiction." For exam- ple, a bogus plaintiff. Doe, complained that a sham defendant, Eoe — the release for a term of years having been made to Doe by the claim- ant, and Doe having entered thereupon — had ousted him ; for which Doe claimed damages ; and subjoined to this declaration was a notice to appear, addressed to the tenant in posses- sion by name, in the form of a letter from Eoe, informing him that he, Eoe, was sued as a '^casual ejector" only, and had no title to the ''FI. fa:' and "OA 8Ar 53 premises, and would make no defence ; and there- fore advising liim to appear in court and defend his own title ; otherwise he, Roe, would suffer judgment to be had against him, and thereby the party addressed would be turned out of pos- session. At this time of day, the Doe and Roe bur- letta seems as absurd as the story of the mon- goose which was to be used as a means of curing a person sutfering from delirium tremens and the delusion that he saw strange creatures crawling round a grandmother's clock; but which, confessedly, was not a real mongoose ; yet, for all the unreality of Doe and Roe, they endured for centuries, and may have been in their time the means of some millions of pounds sterling changing hands. And the Cajnas ad Satisfaciendum. ! It was a rare old writ. The writ of Fieri Facias took and continues to take your goods in execution ; the writ of Capias took j^ourself. In my boy- hood it could be issued for a judgment debt of any amount ; but by an Act passed in the eighth year of Her Majesty's reign it was enacted that no person should be charged or taken in 54 THmGS AND PEOPLE. execution on a judgment obtained in an}^ court, superior or inferior, in any action far the re- covery of a debt not exceeding twenty pounds. Thus, as the dramatic action of " Pickwick " takes place at least a dozen years prior to the passing of the Act of Parliament in question, Sam Weller need not have borrowed so large a sum as five-and-twenty pounds from his father. Ten pounds would have been enough for the purpose of the good and faithful servant when he wished to be arrested and consigned to the same debtors' prison in which his master was languishing. The well-known episode in Pick- wick " will, on the other hand, afford an adequate illustration of the celerity of the operation of the writ of Capias ad Satisfaciendum, or Ca, Sa.,'' as it was familiarly termed. Immediately after Sam had borrowed the money from his stout sire, a pettifogging attorney, Mr. Solomon Pell, was sought out by Mr. Weller, senior, who desired him to issue a writ forthwith for the sum of twenty-five pounds and costs of process to be executed with- out delay on the body of one Samuel Weller. The attorney then led the elder Mr. Weller "jpj. fa:' and ''OA. sa:- 55 down to the Temple to swear the affidavit of debts, and subsequently the Wellers, pere et fih, and a select gathering of friends, held a con- vivial meeting in a tavern-parlour, where they tumultuously toasted the Chief Commissioner of the Insolvent Court and Mr. Solomon Pell for having between them whitewashed " or effected the discharge of a gentleman in the coaching line who had got into pecuniary diffi- culties. At four o'clock the sheriff's officer arrived and arrested Sam for the debt and costs ; and so off they all set — the plaintiff and defend- ant walking arm-in-arm, the officer in front, and eight stout coachmen bringing up the rear. At Serjeants' Inn Coffee House the whole party halted to refresh ; and the legal arrangements being completed, the procession moved on again till it reached the gate of the Fleet Prison, where the jovially-sympathetic party, taking the time from the plaintiff, gave three tremen- dous cheers for the defendant, and, after shaking hands all round, left him. The legal arrangements " briefly alluded to above were merely the sueing out of a writ of Habeas Corpus ow. the part of the arrested debtor; 56 THINGS AND FEOFLE. the return to the writ on the part of the plaintiff, and the issuing of an order b}^ a judge sitting in chambers at Serjeants' Inn for the defendant to be committed to the Fleet. Obviously the con- summate art of Dickens led him to desist from again describing the little comedy of the Habeas Coijms, which he had already so inimitably sketched in the case of the arrest of Mr. Pickwick. As an attorney's clerk the great novelist may have served hundreds of writs and sued out as many Capiases and Habeas Corpuses ; and it is inter- esting to those who not only hang lovingly over every line that he penned, but had the advantage of knowing him personally, to remark how the image — evidently drawn from the life — of Mr. Namby, the bailiff who arrested Mr. Pickwick, dwelt in Dickens's mind long years after the Fleet Prison had vanished from the face of the earth. It must have been about 1860 that I was present at a dinner given at the Freemasons' Tavern in honour of Charles Dickens the Younger, who was about to start on a voyage to China; and the chair was occupied by his illus- trious father. One of the company, a very well- "FL FAr AND GA. SA: 57 known man o£ letters, long since deceased and in his latter years desperately impecunious, had partaken somewhat too liberally of the juice of the grape, and was getting rather troublesome : whereupon Dickens whispered to his next neigh- bour ''Tell him" — meaning the troublesome guest — ''that there is a stout party downstairs with bushy whiskers and top-boots, in a one- horse chaise. He will be glad enough, then, to escape by a side door." The novelist had evidently before him at that moment, twenty- four years after he had written " Pickwick," the image of Mr. Namby with his whiskers, his rough greatcoat, his glaring silk handkerchief, and his boots. Why the sheriff's officers of the past should have habitually worn top-boots I know no more than I do why the bailiffs of the seventeenth century were generally Flemings. When you were arrested on a Capias in the county of Middlesex, four courses were open to you. First, you might pay the debt and costs ; but even under these circumstances you were de- tained — usually at the office of the bailiff — until the plaintiff or his solicitor could be communi- cated with, and a discharge for the debt given. 58 THINGS AND PEOPLE. ^^'ext, i£ 3"ou had a sufficiency of petty cash about you, you might elect to be taken to the sheriff's officer's own private place of durance, which, in popular parlance, was known as a spunging-house." If you could not afford to pay for the somewhat costly accommodation pro- vided at these private penal hotels, you were taken to the common debtors' gaol in Whitecross Street ; but, fourthly, if you had the two pounds ten shillings necessary to obtain a Habeas Corjyus, you might be transferred from the custody of the sheriff's officer to the Fleet or to the Queen's Bench. The old spunging-house has been amusingly described, both by Dickens in Pickwick," and by Thackeray in ''Vanit}^ Fair" and in some of his shorter stories. The places of this kind which recur to me were situated respectively in Cursitor Street, Chancer}^ Lane ; in a court, the name of which I forget, opening out of the west side of the lane in question ; and in Bream's Buildings, between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane. The Carsitor Street one may perhaps be defined as the Mivart's among these peculiar hostelries. There was nothing to mark the fact of the house ''•FI. FAr AND 'OA. SAr 59 being a place of enforced detention, save rows of substantial bars to all the windows, and the roof- ing over with open ironwork of the small paved yard in which the gentlemen in difficulties took exerqise. The outer door was, of course, strongly bolted and barred at night ; otherwise the in- terior was one of the queerest of Liberty Halls imaginable. The payment of a guinea a day entitled the detenu not only to a bed, which was clean enough and comfortable enough, but to the use of an apartment called the coffee-room, on the first floor back, overlooking the paved yard. I scarcely think that, save at breakfast time, much coffee was consumed in this place of social and convivial intercourse. Pegs" of spirits and aerated waters, or modest quenchers " of bitter beer or brown stout, were much more to the taste of the unwilling guests and their friends than the product of Mocha or other localities whence that which is erroneously known as a ''bean," but which is in reality the seed of a berry, is sup- posed to come. Smoking was the almost uni- versal rule — and, indeed, the curtains, the furni- ture, and the carpets reeked with the fumes of at least fifty years' almost incessant puffing of 60 THIXGS AXD PEOPLE. cigars and pij^es. Miserably pathetic scenes might be witnessed on occasion in this Cursitor Street coffee-room — spendthrifts, whom their mothers came to pity or their fathers' solicitors to reproach — mere boys, who in a year or^two had run through princely fortunes; hoarj'-headed old roues, copper captains, ruined speculators, chronically distressed poets ; penniless parsons, impecunious lords and incurably insolvent baronets, who had managed to live luxuriously on the credit of their titles, but had been towed at last into this shabby dock to be soon laid up in ordinary in the Bench ; while mingled with these were the light-hearted gentlemen in diffi- culties who were continuallv si'ettino: arrested as drawers or acceptors of accommodation bills, and who regarded a few^ days' sojourn in a spunging - house and a longer residence in the Bench as only a cheerful episode in their careers. The copper captains abounded among these gay prisoners. There was the celebrated Captain Jack I , who was wont facetiously to pretend that next morning would never fail to briug about the payment of his debts by a wealthy ''FL fa:' and ''OA. sa:' 61 aunt in Devonshire; and who continually sat on the chair nearest the coffee-room door, with his hat on, his walking-stick in his hand and a rail- way rug across his knees, as though awaiting the imminent arrival of his solicitor with an order of discharge. Then there was rattling Tommy D , a son of one of Her Majesty's judges, who had been a barrister and a Grovernment clerk, a lieutenant of marines, a company pro- moter, a newspaper proprietor, and an advertising agent, and was so constant an habitue of the Cursitor Street caravansary that one morning, on his fresh arrival, he looked round the coffee- room, and especially at the very dingy prints which adorned the walls, and asked, in a tone of affected surprise, Where is the view of Corfu?" In addition to the common-room there were private apartments to be had at the spunging- house. These apartments were sometimes very handsomely furnished ; and their occupants were often gentlemen occupying very exalted positions indeed in the most fashionable society. It was usually French hazard at Crockford's, or plung- ing on the turf, or a Pet of the Ballet that had 62 TEmG8 AXD PEOPLE. brought tliem to this pass. Only traders could be made bankrupts five-and-fifty years ago ; and a gentleman in difficulties, when he had moved from Cursitor Street to the Fleet in Farringdon Street, or to the Queen's Bench in Southwark, and had grown tired of incarceration, had only to file his petition and to get whitewashed " at the Court for Insolvent Debtors in Portugal Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. No kind of social stigma attached to a gentleman who had gone through this cheerful process. In these days bankruptcy means, among other things, com- pulsory withdrawal from the club or clubs to which the bankrupt belongs ; but no such un- pleasant consequence was associated with insol- vency. No one was ashamed of confessing in open court that he had not one farthing wherewith to discharge indebtedness possibly amounting to many thousands of pounds ; and so easily and so quickly conducted was insolvency, that in one notorious case a Commissioner of Insolvency — a very humorous and highly popular barrister — positively went through his own court and w^as whitewashed, so to speak, out of his own buckets. The Lord Chancellor did not call 'FL fa:' and ''OA, sa:' 63 on that learned Commissioner of Insolvency to resign. Whitecross Street Prison was tenanted, as a rule, by debtors as hopelessly poverty-stricken as those who occupied the Old Marshalsea in Southwark, and the debtors' side of Horse- monger Lane Graol. For gentlemen in difficul- ties arrested in the county of Surrey there was a single spunging-house in a street somewhere off the Blackfriars Eoad. I remember visiting a friend there once, who told me that the apart- ments were extremely comfortable. The sheriff s officer was an accomplished whist-player, and he had a musical daughter, who used to play and sing to the gentlemen in ''diffs." My friend used to call her Miss Blondel, and pictured her as warbling " Oh, Eichard, Oh, mon Eoi ! " to some exceptionally good-looking captive. The mournful inhabitants of Whitecross Street had very rarely passed through the spunging-houses of Cursitor Street or of Bream's Buildings, and the bailiffs who arrested them took them straight to Whitecross Street. The prison itself was ugly and dingy enough; but it had no very specially gaol-like appearance. Four high brick 64 THINGS AND PEOPLE. walls, duly spiked, enclosed an area of about an acre of ground, within which were the day- rooms and dormitories and two well-paved yards for exercise, the whole edifice being well ven- tilated and scrupulously clean. The prison was the property of the City Cor- poration, and was administered by a governor, a deputy-governor, and a sufficient number of war- ders, or, as I think they used to be called half a century since, turnkeys. All these functionaries received handsome salaries, and the governor was generally a military man. There was a standing joke among the hahitiies of the prison that the governor should always be knighted and created a ''Ca.Sa.B." The joke was a sorry one; but a very little fun went a very long way in this abode of misery, which held within its walls not only spendthrifts and ne'er-do-weels, but im- poverished tradesmen and needy working-men committed for non-payment of sums as low as forty shillings. In addition to these there was usually among the detenus a Chancery prisoner — that is to say, an unfortunate individual consigned to Whitecross Street, by decree of the High Court of Chancerj^ for contempt of court. 'FL FAr AND " GA, 8 A." 65 for not filing an answer to certain legal pro- ceedings. The Chancery prisoner in Pick- wick is about one of the most pathetic charac- ters that Dickens ever drew ; and that deplorable creature had managed to get transferred to the Fleet ; but there were a few replicas of that pitiable type in Whitecross Street, and to a much greater extent in the King's Bench. The Inland Ee venue had also its captives in every debtors' prison. There was a duty of eighteenpence payable on every advertisement inserted in any newspaper; and, as journals started without sufficient capital were in the habit of coming to grief with painful frequency, and the penalties for non-payment of the adver- tisement duties were cumulative, there was usually a sprinkling of indigent publishers as prisoners, they being responsible to the Crown for the debts of the newspaper proprietors. Of course Whitecross Street had a chapel and a chaplain, an infirmary and a medical attendant, who enjoyed the liberal salary of three hundred a year. In each yard was posted, in a conspicuous position, a tall black- board, on which was painted, in letters of gold, / 66 THINGS AND PEOPLE. a list of all the charitable bequests made at different periods by deceased benefactors for the succour of the poor debtors. There were not many of these endowments belonging to White- cross Street, but in cases in which the prisoners were altogether destitute, they received a com-, paratively liberal allowance of rations from the Corporation. At one corner of the yard was a kind of huckster's stall, or everything " shop, where the prisoners' caterer sold butcher's meat, bacon, sausages, eggs, bread, butter, cheese, and other articles of food ; and twice a day he was allowed to sell one pint, and not more than one pint, of beer per head to such prisoners as could afford malt-liquor. A quart of beer or a pint of wine per diem was the maximum amount of strong liquor fixed by order of the Secretary of State for the Home Department. Spirits were altogether prohibited, and as the prisoners slept in large dormitories, and there were no private rooms, the existence of a whistling-shop," such as we read of in the description of the Fleet in Pickwick," was, practically, an impossibility. The day-rooms, or wards, each held about fifty prisoners, who took their meals in common. ''FL FA." AND GA. 6'^." 67 Some boarded themselves ; others were content to pay two shillings and sixpence per diem to the day-steward, who provided breakfast at nine, luncheon at twelve — when the first pint of beer was procurable — and dinner at five. A day- warden received eight shillings a week for cleaning the knives and forks and waiting at table ; while the bed-warden made the beds, cleaned the boots, provided hot water for the toilet, and assisted in waiting at table : for which services he received seven-and-sixpence a week. Cups and saucers, plates, jugs; the knives and forks aforesaid ; mustard, salt, and pepper were all provided from a common fund, which was formed by every member paying three-and-sixpence upon entrance, and one shil- ling per week while he remained in prison. Plenty of newspapers were supplied out of this fund. On certain evenings in the week the gentle- men in difficulties had recitations and debates ; and on Saturdays there was a vocal concert, instrumental music being for some reason or another forbidden. Smoking was mercifully permitted between the hours of meals and until /2 68 THINGS AND PEOPLE, the prisoners went to their dormitories at night ; but no gambling was allowed, and cards were strictly forbidden. Chess, draughts, back- gammon, and dominoes were, however, tolerated. It will thus be seen that, in comparison with Holloway or the provincial gaols in which debtors are still confined for non-payment of judgment orders or neglect of judgment sum- monses in the County Court, Whitecross Street Prison was quite a jovial and festive place— an out-of-elbows club, indeed, for which nobody cared to be a candidate, but election to w^hich, when a Capias was issued against yon, was com- pulsory. When, however, you became a member of this City cerde, existence was certainly endur- able, and on thirty shillings a week a prisoner in Whitecross Street might even enjoy no small amount of luxury. It was coarse certainly, but neither scanty nor squalid. Over the chimney in one of the wards some prisoner of artistic taste had blazoned, in colours and gold-leaf, a burlesque heraldic achievement, and beneath, in large Gothic letters, was the motto Dum Spiro Spero!' The prisoners tried to live up to the motto ; but you had only to scan their faces in ''FI. fa:' and ''OA. 8A: 69 the intervals of the singing and the reciting, and the chess and backgammon playing, to see hopeless wretchedness marked on the features of at least three out of four captives — marked there as distinctly as the wretch doomed to death in the tribunal of old Greece had the fatal word Thanatos branded on his brow. 70 CHAPTER XII. THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST. DifiPereiice between the Fast Life of the Present and that of the ' Past— The Effect of Evening Dress : A New Clothes Philosophy — Lord Frederick Yerisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk — " The Wildest Young- Dog About Town" — A Museum of Stolen •'Curios" — The "Mad Marquis" and His Frolics — Grambling in Regent Street — " G-reeks" — Jack Thartell and His Victim — Arthur Thistlewood : How He was Ruined— " Crockford's " — Superintendent Beresfordand His Raids — The "Night Houses" of the Haymarket — " The Pic." — Panton Street. If there be anything of the character of that which used to be understood as ''Fast Life in the social manners of the present epoch, a good many years have passed since I knew anything about such fastness. The records of the courts of law and police prove, sadly enough, that vice and profligacy are prevalent in most classes of society ; and that in the lower grades of the couches sociales there is still a deplorable amount of drunkenness and ruffianism, which will abate, it is to be hoped, when the people are better lodged, better taught, and better clothed, but which will not, I should say, be THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST. 71 stamped out by any drastic Acts of Parliament for bringing down to the Pump a people who have been convivial in their habits for more than a thousand years. Still, the street affrays of which one reads ; the assaults on the police ; the furious driving by drunken revellers, and the vagaries of unfortunates, whose names are only too well known, do not constitute such a fast life as I remember very well some fifty years ago, and in which, when I grew up, I took a rather active part myself. The fast " life of the past, on which I propose to descant, was one that was enjoyable — if enjoyment is ihe proper term to be given to madcap dissipation and mischievous practical joking by almost every class in male society. There had been little solution of continuity in that fast " life, so far as the metropolis was concerned, since that tremendous re- action against Puritanism — the Restoration. The Mohocks of Queen Anne's time, among whom was a son of the Eight Rev. Bishop Burnet, were the lineal descendants of the Whipping Toms of Charles IT.'s reign. Roches- ter and Sedley transmitted their besmirched 72 THINGS AND PEOPLE. laurels to the bloods and beaux who get drunk and gamble and fight duels in Hogarth's pictures ; and the traditions of excess and devilry in high life were followed with amusing fidelity through- out the reign of Gejrge III., which began with the scandalous frolics of Jack Wilks and the Friars of Medmenham Abbey, and ended with that '^fast" life which has been so divertingly depicted in Pierce Egan's Life in London." I am not old enough to have met Bob Logic or Corinthian Tom in the flesh ; although I can remember witnessing a performance of Life in London," in which occurs the celebrated dance of Dusty Bob and Black Sal." Still, about the close of the reign of King William IV. and the accession of Queen Victoria, I must have known .and listened to a good many middle-aged gentle- men who, in their hot youth, had been renowned for their skill in fisticuffs and their fondness for ratting, badger-baiting, and cock-fighting, and to whom a dining-room mahogany possessed one attribute which it has long since lost — that of being a table under which the large proportion of the guests were accustomed to subside when they had swilled too much port or sherry. THE FAST LIFE OF THE FAST 73 The riot, the tunnoil, the inebriety, the pugnaciousness, of which you obtain inklings in the literature and the newspaper files of fifty years ago, were, I take it, very largely due to the circumstance that the attitude of England towards foreign nations, at intervals through- out the eighteenth and continuously during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, had been much more frequently one of war than of peace. In a time of arms laws are mute, says the old Latin saw; and, perhaps, epochs when there are almost incessantly wars and rumours of wars afoot are more conducive to coarseness and brutality of manners than when the world is calm and meek-eyed peace reigns supreme. Grenerally speaking, I incline to the impres- sion that what little ''fast" life we have left among us in the upper ranks of society has had its roughness materially modified by the habit of donning evening dress on the slightest pro- vocation ; of smoking cigarettes ; of wearing gar- denias in the button-hole, and of drinking lemon squashes, or at least modicums of ardent s^^irits largely diluted with aerated waters. A gentle- man in a sable swallowtail coat, a white cravat, a 74 THINGS AND PEOPLE. snowy shirt-front with a diamond stud in the centre, and a Gribus hat, thinks twice before he punches " the heads of cabmen and defies police- constables to single combat ; and when we remember that the present time is one in which even prize-fighters appear in evening dress, I think there is something in my contention that ''fast'' life in 1894 is altogether more polished, more refined, and perhaps a little less courageous and daredevil than the roaring horseplay and the coarse dissoluteness of the past. I began to look at life with keen curiosity- — a curiosity which at this present writing is not by any means satiated — about the year 1836 or 1837 ; about which time I had recovered from a long and dismal probation of total blindness. If you will be kind enough to look at the twenty-sixth chapter of Nicholas Nickleby," you will find, in about a dozen lines, a wonder- fully grai^hic conspectus of the fast " life which I, as a child, and with absorbed attention, peered into. In the chapter of which I speak the place is a handsome suite of private apartments in Regent Street. The time is three in the afternoon to the dull and plodding, and the first hour of the THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST, 75 morning to the gay and spirited. The persons are Lord Frederick Verisopht and his friend Sir Mulberry Hawk. These distinguished gentle- men, both suffering from acute headache, are reclining listlessly on a couple of sofas, with a table between them, on which are scattered in rich confusion the materials of an untasted breakfast. Newspapers lie strewn about the room ; but these, like the meal, are neglected and unnoticed. ''These appearances," writes Charles Dickens, would in themselves have furnished a pretty strong clue to the extent of the debauch of the previous night, even if there had not been other indications of the amuse- ments in which it had been passed. A couple of billiard-balls all mud and dirt, two battered hats, a champagne bottle with a soiled glove twisted round the neck to allow of its being grasped more surely in its capacity of an offen- sive weapon, a broken cane, a card case with- out the top, an empty purse, a watch-guard snapped asunder, a handful of silver mingled with fragments of half-smoked cigars and their stale and crumbled ashes; these and many other tokens of riot and disorder hinted very 76 THINGS AND PEOPLE. intelligibly at the nature of last night's gentle- manly frolics." In this terse but eminently truthful picture there is a most convincing proof of the assimila- tive power of the genius of Dickens. He could scarcely have actually seen the aristocratic fast life of which he gives his readers so vivid an impression. He divined it. At the time when he was writing Nicholas Nickleby " he was a youthful Benedick, living in modest peace and happy competence with his comely wife; and the ''fast" life which he may have witnessed in his bachelor days would be more of the character of that of w^hich we have such delightful glimpses in the medical students' supper-party, and the revelries of the lawyers' clerks at the Magpie and Stump, in Pickwick " ; or the con- vivialities of Mr. Richard Swiveller and his friends, in the Old Curiosity Shop." The boiled leg of mutton and trimmings swarry " of the Bath footmen may have had a slight foundation in fact ; but the incidents and conversation are, I should say, in the main, imaginary. Thackeray had his ideal flunkey and Dickens his ; but neither Mr. Jeames THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST, 77 Yellowplush nor Mr. John Sniauker is entirely true to nature. Dickens had certainly never been the boon companion of Lord Frederick Verisopht or Sir Mulberry Hawk. Those worthies moved in a world — and a very bad and profligate world it was — to which the youthful novelist was socially a stranger ; but he had read all about their doings in the police reports, and may even have been present as a reporter in those police courts in which the frolicsome gentle- men so frequently made their appearance as defendants. Now it curiously happens that the force of circumstances brought me in daily contact and converse, if not with the Hawks, at least with the Verisophts. My dear mother was something more than a distinguished teacher of Italian singing. She was a gentle- woman of high culture and great intellectual gifts. She knew everybody in society ; and her drawing-room was a real salon, in which might be found not only the great lords and ladies of the age — not only the leading repre- sentatives of literature and art, but all the wits and the beaux, the dandies, and the gay young 78 THINGS AND PEOPLE. fellows of the time. In 1836-7 young gentle- men who habitually drank too much champagne and too much brandy, frequented common gaming-houses, beat the police or got beaten by them and were locked up in the station-house for the night, were only termed a little wild,", and they were not ostracised from society. From that society, in these more refined days, I suppose, Johnnies " and Chappies " who, like Hans Breitmann's bush-whacker, ''raise Cain and break things," are inexorably banished. It happened that we lived in a first floor in the Regent's Quadrant, and, at the time of which I speak, the entresol beneath w^as occupied by Mr. Charles L , who was, perhaps, the wildest young dog about town of that fiercely wild epoch. He was supremely handsome — handsome even for a period when Count Alfred d'Orsay was the model of male comeliness in London, His apparel was gorgeous even for a time when gentlemen wore two or three coloured and white under-waistcoats and an over-vest of velvet or rich brocade, with a long gold chain meandering over it, and above it a high satin stock adorned by two jewelled breastpins united THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST, 79 by a thin chain of gold — a time when young Mr. Benjamin Disraeli moved in patrician circles in black velvet pantaloons and with ruffles at his wrists. Mr. Charles L had run through a couple of fortunes, one of which at least had been squandered over French hazard at Crock- ford's. He was very well educated, very urbane, nay, almost fascinating in his manner ; and he usually came home about four o'clock in the morning either boisterously, lyrically, pugilisti- cally, or maniacally drunk. When he did not return to the e??tresol hi^ manservant used to opine that his master had reached the incapable stage of intoxication, and that he had been conveyed on a stretcher to St. James's Watchhouse, just round the corner ; and he would philosophically proceed to wait upon him there with a change of linen and a small silver flask full of brandy. After a few seasons spent in the manner at which I have hinted, Mr. Charles L married an Anglo-Indian widow of immense wealth. On the second floor above us, in Eegent Street, a French milliner, whom I may call Madame Fretillon, had her showroom ; and es- pecially busy was Madame at that particular 80 THINGS AND PEOPLE. period of the London season when the annual fruit and flower show of the Eoyal Horticultural Society used to take place in their gardens at Chiswick. One afternoon — it was the day before the show — the Honourable Billy D , with his friend, Mark B. W. — the last a cousin of the Mad Marquis " — called to see my mother. I was rather afraid of the Honourable Billy J) for the reason that, although he was of a most genial and hilarious temperament, and frequently tipped " me with half-crowns, he was actuated by an intense yearning to remove two of my front teeth in order that I might be able to give a peculiar whistle which he had heard at Stunniug Joe Somebody's hot sausage and gin-punch supper-parties in Buckeridge Street, St. Griles's. The whistle, I believe, was a signal made by a boy outside Stunning Joe Somebody's estab- lishment to warn the guests within that the New Police were about to enter the premises ; whereupon those of the company who had good reasons for avoiding a personal interview with the constables prudently withdrew, by means of a convenient trap-door, into a cellar commimicat- ing with an alley at the rear. TSE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST. 81 Considering that we were not in the habit of receiving burglars, coiners, and pickpockets at our modest repasts in Regent Street, I cannot exactly discern why the Honourable Billy should have wished to knock two of my front teeth out. He was, in all respects, a remarkable personage — had been in the army; but at the affectionately earnest request of his commanding officers had exchanged from regiment to regiment until he ultimately sold out. Then he became a man about town. It was he who in his chambers at Bruton Street had a museum of articles which he and the gay sparks who associated with him had conveyed " from the tradesmen who were the proprietors thereof. A museum such as the one of which the Hon. Billy D was so proud, and par- donably proud in the estimation of his frisky contemporaries, would be in these days practi- cally an impossibility ; since the collector who attempted to bring together such an assemblage of commercial and domestic curios would be in perpetual peril of indictment at the Old Bailey or the County of London Sessions for larceny. All the brass plates bearing announce- ments relative to academies for young ladies. 82 THINGS AND PEOPLE. medical practitioners, agents to the Moon Fire Insurance Office, and professors of the piano- forte ; all the knockers, ranging from the fierce lion's head in iron to the diminutive Sphinx in brass ; all the bell-pull handles and signboards ; all the Original Little Dust Pans ; the huge red effigies of human hands which had hung over glovers' shops ; the arms brandishing hammers which had been the signs of goldbeaters — had been impudently looted in the public thoroughfares by the Honourable Billy D and his larky " companions. I am not quite certain as to whether he was able to carry out his intention of stealing a turnpike- gate from Ewell to serve as a portal to his collec- tion of street plunder ; but he was quite capable of attempting such an heroic act of filibustering. As it was, the predatory laurels which he had won formed a most extraordinary chaplet. It was he who, in conjunction with other companions of the " Mad Marquis," tried to carry off the stone lions which flanked the entrance to a well- known shop in Eegent Street ; and it was onl}^ by an accident that he was not present when a group of tearing young aristocrats, his intimate THE FAST LIFE OF THE FAST. 83 friends, achieved their notable exploit, at dead of night, of pouncing upon an unfortunate police- man, binding him hand and foot, painting him pea-green, and lowering him by means of a rope into the area of a mansion at the West End, where he was discovered next morning by the sympathising damsel who answered the milk- man's summons. In this last-named cliivalric adventure the tearing youDg aristocrats went just a little too far. The Police Commissioners of the day, Colonel Eowan and Mr., afterwards Sir Eichard Mayne, took up the case of the outraged ''bobby" very seriously indeed. Two of the uproarious young practical jokers were indicted for a mis- demeanour ; and on conviction were sentenced to a somewhat heavy fine and to a few months' imprisonment in the King's Bench prison. The brief incarceration did not by any means damp the high spirits of these gay young bloods. Why, indeed, should it have done so ? As I have had occasion to show when in the preceding chapter I treated of imprisonment for debt in the past, the old Bench, of which not one stone now, happily, remains upon another, was a place where. 84 THINGS AND PEOPLE. with a sufficiency of ready money, life might be made not only tolerable but crapulously luxuri- ous ; and smugglers, libellers, persons committed for contempt of court, and other misdemeanants v/ho had cash at call, could enjoy themselves quite as heartily as the moneyed debtors could do. The dashing young patricians, who were consigned to the Bench for painting the bobby" pea-green gave dinner-parties to their friends ; drank cham- pagne, and smoked cigars of the best brands ; played racquets, and lounged about in Cashmere shawl dressing-gowns, to the admiration and envy of the more indigent gaol-birds. That Mad Marquis," whom I often saw and whom I heard of almost every day, was not half so crazy as people in this generation are apt to imagine that he was. The Marquis of W , indeed, while gratifying his eccentric whims to the utmost, was not much of a spendthrift. He neither squandered thousands on the turf nor wasted his substance at Crockford's and kindred hells. In fact, although a desperate roysterer, he was rather a frugal than a prodigal peer, and enjoyed an immense amount of what he con- sidered to be fun at a comparatively moderate THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST, 85 outlay of cash. For example, when he and the Hon. Billy D called on my mother, as already stated, and at the conclusion of the visit ascended to Madame Fretillon's show-room, and in the absence of the lady assistants, who were at tea, sat down consecutively on twenty- two new bonnets which were to be worn by ladies of distinction in fashionable society at the approaching flower show, Madame, after much weeping and wailing, wringing of her hands, and declaring that she was a ruined woman, was glad to accept a fifty pound note from his lordship and a douceur of ten guineas from the Hon. Billy D as a solatium for the injuries which her wares had suffered. And if she did keep her assistants at work till five o'clock the next morning to repair the damage done, there was in those happy-go-lucky days no troublesome Government inspector to spy out the matter and summon her to a police-court for an infraction of the Factories and Workshops Acts. Then again, when the Marquis himself was arraigned at Marlborough Street for furiously driving his tilbury through a crowded thoroughfare, and endeavoured to bring his 86 TJTINGS AKB PEOPLE. horse into court as a witness for tlie defence, not much more harm was done to his purse than the disbursement of a few half-sove- reigns among the police who prevented the ingress of the noble steed to the magisterial presence ; and furthermore, when the droll idea caught his lordship's fancy of driving about with a wolf chained underneath his dog-cart, nobody came to grief save the wolf, which managed, poor brute, to strangle itself in its bonds. Another frolic, of a somewhat more expensive nature, was the purchase one night from a publican in the Haymarket of a cask of gin, which his lordship caused to be brought into the street, and from which he regaled in half-pint measures the cabmen, the pickpockets, the beggars, and the wantons who then infested that now highly- respectable thoroughfare. We all know that the Mad Marquis abandoned all his vagaries ere he had reached middle life and settled down on the paternal estates, and in due course came to be known as an exemplary landlord and a model husband. No picture, however slight, of the fast '' life of the past, as I studied it in my youth, would THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST. 87 be complete without some reference to tlie habit of gambling which prevailed in aristocratic and upper-middle class society in London at the beginning of the Victorian era. I have men- tioned that we resided, a little more than half a century since, in Regent Street ; and, indeed, I think my mother, between 1835 and 1845, must have occupied from time to time at least a dozen different first floors in the agreeable avenue built by Nash, Prince of Architects, between the Piccadilly and the Oxford Circuses ; our permanent home being all the while at Brighton. Regent Street we only inhabited as birds of passage during the season. The particular first floor in the entresol of which lived the bibulous Mr. L , and on the second floor of which the Marquis and the Hon. Billy D sat on the Horticultural Show bonnets, was in a house with a common gambling-hell on one side and a private and most select place for gaming on the other. The private Inferno was merely the small but very handsomely-furnished back- parlour of a shop, in which a plump and swarthy widow lady — a Madame Une Telle, 88 THINGS AND PEOPLE. whose black eyes could flash almost as brightlj^ as her abundant diamonds did — sold cigars, and those, too, of the very finest brands of Havana tobacco, to the nobility and gentry. She had only one assistant, a sturd}^, middle- aged, clean-shaven, pock-marked, closely-cropped, square-headed, broad-chested man, with a broken nose, who was dressed very plainly, but neatly, and was a model of civility and alacrity in serving customers. How it came about I know not ; but I harboured in my boyish mind a secret per- suasion that the clean-shaven assistant in the cigar shop had once been a member of the ring." He at once became in my eyes a hero of romance; and I drew him innumer- able times in all kinds of pugilistic attitudes —stripped to the waist, girt with a blue Belcher handkerchief, and with shorts and white cotton stockings, terminating in ankle- jacks. Why Madame Une Telle should have hired him from the ring " and made him her shopman I cannot authoritatively say. Possibly he may have been found useful very late at night as a chuck er-out/' not of Madame's own clients, THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST 89 but of unprivileged persons in a questionable state of sobriet}^ who might have sought during the small hours to obtain admission to the little back-parlour where, so I was told, many thousands of pounds sterling were lost in the course of every year. The place w^as, in fact, a kind of tiny chapel-of-ease to Crockford's, in St. James's Street ; and from that palatial gambling den the greatest noblemen and gentlemen in England, when they were tired of calling " mains," would come down to Madame Une Telle to chat, and smoke, and eventually adjourn to the back parlour, where, with the refreshments of champagne, brandy and water, broiled bones, and anchovy toast, they would fall to gambling again and keep the dice clacking merrily until four or five or six in the morning. The whole neighbourhood on both sides of the Quadrant was spotted, and plenti- fully spotted too, with gambling-houses, which on our side spread through Air Street into Piccadilly, and then down St. James's Street ; while on the opposite side the gambling-house pestilence reached as far as Golden Square. To the east there were numerous trtpots in 90 THINGS AND FEOFLE. Prince's Street, and Cranborne Alley, and Leicester Square ; but these were of a lower and altogether more repulsive type than the showy Infernos of Regent Street and St. James's. The lower-class dens were known as silver hells/' for the reason that stakes as low as half- a-crown were accepted; and so late as 1847 or 1848 there was — at least I have a dim impres- sion of its existence — a very shady gambling house, indeed, close to Leicester Square, and which was called The Little Nick." It may seem almost incredible, but it is nevertheless the fact, that in a notorious weekly journal, published at the period of which I am speaking, there appeared regularly every week a couple of columns with the attractive heading of Pan- demonium ; " and therein the readers of the journal in question were kept duly an courant with the edifying proceedings at the most noted gaming-houses of the time, the professional frequenters of which were known, in the slang of the epochs, as Grreeks." The " Greek " of half a century since was a type that may be said to have completely disappeared in these days. He was something superior to a welsher," and THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST. 91 something inferior to a promoter of bogus companies and wild cat " proprietary clubs. Now and again, perhaps, a shadow faintly resembling his ghost may be seen hanging about the vestibule of the Casino at Monte Carlo ; but the authorities of the Hades on the Riviera are well aware of the phantom "Grreek's" character, and scrupulously exclude him from the interior of the Casino itself. In England the gaming-house Greek " very frequently dubbed himself a captain ; and in some few instances, possibly, he may have held a subaltern's commission in that celebrated British Auxiliary Legion commanded by General Sir de Lacy Evans, which, with the authority of the Reform Parliament, was sent out to Spain in the interests of Queen Christina and her daughter, Queen Isabella, to fight the partisans of Don Carlos. The British auxiliaries were very irregularl}^ paid, if they were paid at all, by the Spanish Government. In my boyhood it was by no means uncommon to see deplorable creatures in ragged scarlet jackets, proclaiming their former connection with the British Legion, sweeping crossings or begging in the streets of 92 THINGS AND PEOPLE. London. The greater number, however, of the gambling-house Greeks " were the merest of copper captains, who were emploj^ed as touts or bonnets " to inveigle foolish or half-intoxicated gentlemen into common gaming-houses, where they could be swindled out of their money at hazard, faro, or roulette. An exceptionally infamous ''Greek" of the generation just preceding that of which I am speaking was the notorious Jack Thurtell, who in his youth had actually been an officer in the army, but who after the peace had taken to betting on horse-races and prize fights, and to cheating the persons who were simple enough to play cards with him. His victim, Mr. Weare, w^ho '' lived in Lyon's Inn," was, in point of morals, not very much above the status of the villain wdio murdered him. Weare, in short, was a professional gamester, and he was led to join in the expedi- tion which ended so fatally for him b}^ a story trumped up by Thurtell and his confederates that there was a " pigeon " to be plucked some- where out of town. The poor wretch himself was the " pigeon." The mischief effected by THE FAST LIFE OF THE FAST, 93 these common gaming houses with their Greek bonnets " and touts was almost immeasur- able. Midnight gambling sapped the very vitals, economically speaking, of the community, and directly and indirectly led to innumerable tragedies. It is, perhaps, a fact known to very few save systematic students of old newspapers that the remote cause of the ruin and the dreadful end of Arthur Thistlewood, the chief of the Cato Street conspirators, who, with their leader, were hanged and beheaded before the Debtors' Door, Newgate, in 1820, was a misadventure which he met with in a gaming house. Thistle- wood was the son of a country gentleman of fair estate. When quite a young man he was sent up to London with a very large sum of money — reaching four figures, if I remember aright — in his possession, to make some investment on behalf of a relative. He had this money about him in bank notes ; when, having dined much too copiously at a tavern, he was enticed by some improvised acquaintance of the Greek '' order to try his luck in a gambling house. There he was stripped of every farthing of the 94 THINGS AND FEOFLB. money he had about him. He made, subse- quently, some ineffectual attempt to show that the play had been unfair, and to recover some portion of his losses ; but the wretched mishap in the gaming-house led, step by step, to his utter destruction, and he became an impoverished desperado, who drifted first into sedition, and then into treason, very possibly because he had become altogether a social leper and pariah. It was impossible that the evils at which I have briefly glanced could be allowed to go on unchecked for any considerable time after the accession of the young Queen, and the presence by her side of the Prince Consort, whose dignified, decorous, and blameless character became at once a model to all English gentlemen. Even the great Crockford's felt the influence of the new standard of morals which had been set up at the British Court. The frequenters of the gambling palace in Pall Mall gradually dwindled away ; and not very long after the death in debt and discredit of one of the most brilliant of Crockford's circle — Theodore Hook — the club was disestablished for ever. THE FAST LIFE OF THE FAST. 95 The hour of doom for the common gaming- houses now rapidly approached, and the complete breaking up of these hells " was in a very great measure the work of an exceptionally energetic and resourceful superintendent of police named Beresford, who, with strong contingents of constables, successively and successfully raided ever};^ one of the West End dens. Doors lined with sheet-iron ; bolts, bars, and chains ; contri- vances by which the dice, rakes, and cards could be thrown down a pipe connecting with the sewer, and an ingenious device by means of which a roulette-wheel could be elevated by cords and pulleys and made to fit into the disc of the over- hanging chandelier, "^were all tried by the gam- bling-house proprietors. But their game was up for good ; and Inspector Beresford and his merry men cleaned out the hell-keepers, their touts, and their bonnets " quite as efficaciously as the rascals themselves had cleaned out innumerable dupes. Manj^ of the gambling house proprietors had realised handsome fortunes ; and in after life I came casually across a few of them who, like the Shums in Thackeray's story — after Mr. Shum had retired from the crossing-sweeping 96 THINGS AND PEOPLE, business — passed for quite respectable people." Joe Martingale, if I remember aright, dabbled in antique plate ; and Fred Elbowsbake cultivated a taste for the Old Masters. It would be an insult to the common-sense of m}^ readers were I to attempt to contend that illegal gambling is not to some extent prevalent in the metropolis at the present moment ; yet I do maintain that we have in our midst, nowadays, no state of society even remotely approximating to that which existed when Crockford's had twenty tributaries, little less palatial than itself, in the parish of St, James alone, and when Regent Street and its vicinity literally swarmed with common and private hells." The next phase of fastness " which I not only witnessed but was intimately con- cerned with may have ascribed to it the date of 1847 or 1848 ; and such ''fastness" obtained, I should say, until the passing of the last Licensing Act in 1874, which definitively swept away those remarkable institutions " the night houses " of the Haymarket and its immediate neighbourhood. The Haymarket ! As I sit THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST. 9 in a quiet study by the side of the sea, the word as it falls from my pen is as the sound of a trumpet, long hushed, but which for a moment has a strange clangour in mine ear. The Hay- market ! 1 drive by it sometimes late at night coming home from the play or from dining out. The Haymarket of the present, as T have already hinted, is a thoroughly respectable, well-behaved, and prosperous business thoroughfare ; and in the day-time, if I take a walk down the well- remembered street, I am never tired of admiring the handsomeness of the buildings and the display of articles of all kinds in the spacious and well-appointed shops. But the Haymarket of other days ! From eleven p.m. to three and four a.m. all the year round, and Sundays scarcely excepted, the Haymarket was a wild scene of howling, yelling, shrieking carousal and riot. Some- where on the site of the present Criterion Restaurant there was a succursal to the Hay- market in a horrible haunt of dissipation called The Piccadilly Saloon,'' where rowdy people of both sexes danced, drank, smoked, and fought to their own content and to the k 98 THINGS AND PEOPLE, delight, I should say, of the Devil who was watching them from the gallery above. The place was rather handsomely decorated, nor were the liquors adulterated ; but it was impos- sible to prevent disorder in a resort the very foundations of which were laid in defiance of all order and decency ; and the consequence was that the Piccadilly Saloon became a convertible term for permanent brawling, the upshot of which went, occasionally, far beyond the battering of heads and the blackening of eyes. More than one of the fatal duels which began to shock society at the beginning of her Majesty's reign were the direct outcome of a row at The Pic." Bob Somebody's, in the Haymarket itself, was another resort of night-birds, quite as dissipated as The Pic," but not half so noisy ; the pro- prietor being, apart from the equivocal nature of his business, a really worthy fellow, who exercised some kind of selection and control with respect to the guests, male or female, whom he admitted to his establishment. It was in Panton Street, however — Panton Street now so thoroughly irreproachable from a moral point of view — that the night houses did most THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST. 99 thickly congregate. They might be covered, in horse-racing phrase, by a pocket handker- chief, so closely did they pullulate together ; and most of them bore the name of the gaily- dressed dame de comptoir who presided over the revels. " Sally" this, " Nellie" that, " Kate" another, and Jenny " yet another — these were the dames who, rouged and powdered and bedizened in jewels, leered and coquetted with the favourite frequenters of these halls of dazzling light. The champagne was bad and infamously dear ; the spirits were worse ; the cigars were vile, and the company was mixed : that is to say, noblemen and Guardsmen rubbed shoulders with rackety stockbrokers and business men, and young fellows from the country burning to gain an insight into London life after dark. The ladies were splendidly dressed ; and, until they had taken too much of the bad champagne, they usually behaved them- selves. The night-houses were not altogether indiscriminately opened to the public. You had to knock for admission : and before ingress was conceded to you a Judas -wicket or trap was h 2 100 THINGS AND PEOPLE. opened in tlie portal, and you were scrutinised by a janitor inside : the normal qualification which in his eyes entitled a candidate to be inducted into the gay scene being that he should be well dressed, and that he should not be either in an uproarious or a helpless condition of in- toxication. These night-houses had been in existence for some years with the full cognisance of the police, but without suffering any inter- ference from the authorities ; but at last public opinion having begun, through the agency of the press, to wake up in the matter, steps were taken to overhaul the unlicensed houses of the Haymarket and Panton Street, and ascer- tain something definite as to the character of the festivities common there — festivities which the respectable shopkeepers of the neighbour- hood had come to regard as a scandal and a nuisance. A system was introduced of paying police visits at irregular intervals during the night to the more notorious of the Sally," ''Jenny," •'Kate," and "Nellie" places of nightly resort. The lady and gentlemen revellers would be enjoying themselves with delightful hilarity, THE FAST LIFE OF THE PAST 101 say at half-past two in the morning; when a knock of authority would be heard at the outer portal, and the janitor would enter the room with well-affected consternation, and inform the beauteous dame de comptoir that the ''bobbies was come." ''Admit them at once/' was the stereotyped answer of the lovely and, for the nonce, law-abiding female. The janitor took a minute or so to open the heavy door ; and meanwhile the waiters, who were in the joke, carefully removed every lady and gentleman's glass of champagne or tumbler of aerated water with something in it, and con- cealed these Bacchanalian pieces de conviction behind the bar. Then, with solemn march and stern mien, an inspector of police, accompanied by a sergeant, made his appearance, to find only a large number of well-dressed gentlemen chat- ting and smoking, and an equally large number of ladies, attired in the highest style of fashion, and smiling around with an expression of innocence quite enchanting to behold. The inspector produced a note-book from his pocket and wrote something down. Whether it was 102 THINGS AND PEOPLE. the name of the house or the titles of some of the noble lords present, or a verse of the latest comic song, or the Slavonic alphabet, it did not matter much : the whole proceedings being, as the proprietor and the guests knew well enough, and the police authorities knew even better, an egregious and preposterous farce. The at- tendant sergeant did little more than cough behind his right hand in a vaguely ominous and mysterious manner. Then the police would retire, and the revels would begin again ; only, through some curious phenomenon, it was always found that the wines and liquors which had formerly sparkled in tumblers and glasses had unaccountably disappeared during the time of the invasion of the bobbies." Perhaps there was a night-house cat which drank up all that was potable. 103 CHAPTEE XIII. PANTOMIMES PAST AND PRESENT. A Theological Professor with a Taste for Horse-racing- — An Attempt to Recall Bygone Christmases — Boxing Day, 1835 — Gruesome Curtain Raisers on Pantomime Nights — The Police in Early Days — Primitive Pantomime Tricks — A Criticism : "Few Tricks, Fewer Thumps, a Singular Lack of Bumps" — The Covent Garden Pantomime in 1820 — Za-Ze-Zt-Zo-Zoo : Animated Dominoes — P Hides du Blable in 1839 : A Run of a Thousand Nights — The Author Nicknamed — Harlequin Billy Taylor at the Princess's in 1851 — A Feline Comedy — A Change of role. I ONCE enjoyed the friendsliip of a professor of theology in a German universit}^ who, at a moment's notice, could enumerate all the succes- sive winners of the Derby, from Diomed to Blair Athol. He had never been in England, and never evinced any admiration or liking for the noble sport of racing; thus, why it should have occurred to him to learn the names of so many famous English racehorses by heart, passes my comprehension. Still, as Mr. Carlyle has somewhere asked, A learned man, shall he not be learned?" For aught I know to the con- trary, the Teutonic sage with whom I had the 104 THINGS AND PEOPLE, lionour to be acquainted may have been quite as well versed in tlie Acta Sanctorum, tlie Eig Veda, and the Belfast Town and Country Almanack as in the English Eacing Calendar. Eecalling, however, the strange effort of memory made by the enumerator of the Derby winners, I have often wondered how many mature persons of average intelligence and with fairly retentive memories there are who, at call and without reference to their diaries, could be able to tell you how they had passed all their Christmas Days from, say, the age of twelve to sixty. I attempted the task once myself, but xery soon gave it up in despair; since I found a hiatus between a certain Christmas spent in a sick- room, and another, many years afterwards, en- joyed with the hardest of hard work in the painting-room of a London theatre ; and then, after a tolerably well-remembered procession of years, came yet another disastrous blank be- tween a Christmas Day passed at Montreal, in Canada, and one on board a steamer in Bass's Straits voyaging from Launceston to Sydne}'. These failures to summon up in their proper sequence the Christmases of the bygone may PANTOMIMES PAST AND PRESENT 105 have been partly due to the fact that many of my Christmas Days in early life were strictly domestic ones, and that in middle-class society one Christmas Day with its family dinner as intimately resembles the Christmas Day preceding it as the one following it, just as, to most people who are not shepherds, one sheep in a flock re- sembles his forty or his four hundred fellow- muttons. Another reason, possibly, is that I have often had to spend a Christmas Day under anything but festive circumstances, and that occasionally I have designedly thought as little about the convivial aspect of the season as I pos- sibly could, there having occurred considerable difficulty in the way either of becoming the host or a guest at a Christmas dinner at all. Eecognising, therefore, the practical impossi- bility of keeping an accurate account of how many times one has regaled on roast turkey, sirloin of beef, plum pudding, and mince pies, as against the Christmas Days when one was glad to get a sham Christmas dinner at an hotel or restaurant in some foreign country, and those other Christ- mases when one was sick or sorry and had no mind for feasting at all ; or when, with every 106 THINGS AND PEOPLE, wish to be joyous, one was fain to dine with Duke Humphrey, I am trying as well as I can in this chapter to conjure up the memories of a few of the Christmas pantomimes which I have witnessed. There need be no wearisome beating about the bush in this matter ; it will be better to plunge, like Homer, into the midst of things ; and sitting in a cosy study at Brighton on Christmas Eve, 1893, my memory flies back straight as an arrow from a Tartar's bow to Boxing Day, 1835. I was at that period a small boy with a large head, and a great yearn- ing for the acquaintance of giants and dwarfs and fairies and elves ; and for three weeks before Boxing Day that head was full of the most in- toxicating visions of the coming delights of the Christmas pantomime at the Theatre Eoyal, Brighton, to which my mother had promised that I should be taken on the evening of Dec. 26th, provided always that the weather w^as favourable, and, in particular, that it did not rain. Fortunately for my Boxing Day felicity, we had a very cold Yule-tide ; and it was on a fine frosty evening that, with an elder sister and a PANTOMIMES PAST AND PBESENT. 107 group of young friends as small as I, I found myself in a box at the theatre, awaiting with the most intense anxiety the rising of the green curtain on the long yearned-£or pantomime. I do not retain the slightest idea of the nature of the piece which preceded the Christmas enter- tainment. In those days it was customary to have as a first piece on Boxing Night a dread- fully gloomy tragedy, called George Barnwell. In this harrowing production was told the story of the dissolute London apprentice who, lured to crime by the artifices of an objectionable female named Millwood, murdered his uncle, a highly respectable and affluent old gentleman — in the pawnbroking line, I believe ; although, according to some authorities, the uncle thus done to death by his naughty kinsman was a rich grazier at Ludlow. I am inclined to think that the play at Brighton was Barnwell inasmuch as I have just one solitary recollection of a tall young lady, highly rouged, who wore an immense hat and feathers. Possibly, this was the abandoned Sarah Millwood; although I am not prepared to say that the curtain-raiser was not Kotzebue's depressing drama of The 108 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Stranger; and the tall young lady with the rouged cheeks and the huge hat and feathers the repentant Mrs. Haller. It does not matter much at this time of writing, since Lillo's gloomy but exemplary tragedy is almost for- gotten, and Kotzebue's mawkish drama^ trans- lated into stilted English, is very rarely played. Nor, again, can I give any distinct informa- tion as to the plot, scenery, or characters in the " opening" of the Christmas novelty itself . The pantomime may have been called The Babes in the Wood; or Hop o' My Thumb; or The Forty Thieves; or Clierry and Fairstar ; or Cock liohin. All I know is, that to the extrava- ganza, whatever it maj^ have been, its official title was prefixed — the glorious name of Harle- quin — and that suffixed to it was the equally glorious one of the Tairy Somebody. I do not suppose that the opening" was very spectacular ; but we children in the private box, who made so much noise by clapping our hands and laughing so riotously that our buttons, like Peggotty's in David Copperfield," may have flown off our skeleton suits, and the box-keeper was obliged to open the door and request my sister to keep PANTOMIMES PAST AND PRESENT. 109 US — I think he called us young warmints " — quiet, found quite enough spectacle and to spare in the ''tricks" and transformations of the comic business." The ''tricks/' I daresay, were simple and silly enough ; but children, who can be amused and even interested to the stage of fascina- tion, and by the most artless of means, do not stand in need of any very elaborate thauma- turgical delusions. A very plain little founda- tion of glamour is enough for them ; and imagination supplies the rest. There is no spectacle in " Punch and Judy " ; and when do little ones, or even grown-up people, tire of be- holding that historic al fresco drama, and shriek- ing with merriment over the misdeeds of an abandoned ruffian and profligate who murders his devoted wife, and, after cheating the gallows and hanging Jack Ketch himself, is not afraid to confront even the Enemy of Mankind ? The " trick" in the " comic business " at the Brighton pantomime which I can most dis- tinctly remember was the metamorphosis of a policeman into a lobster. The "force" were not very popular in 1835. They had 110 THINGS AND PEOPLE. been but recently established and were con- tumeliously halloaed at by small boys in the street as ''bobbies/' ''peelers/' and " crushers." ISTor in the Avay of uniform were they very lovely to look upon ; since, instead of neat blue tunics and spruce helmets, they were, arrayed in absurdly-cut swallow-tail coats, and wore chimney-pot hats, crowned and bound down the sides with black leather. In the Brighton pantomime Clown and Pantaloon between them captured a policeman and proceeded to boil him in a cauldron, from which they dragged him out turned in hue to a bright scarlet: the transfor- mation having been effected by simply covering him with a veil of red gauze. There was another trick, too, of Harlequin being fired out of a mortar and simultaneously making his ap- pearance in a box on the upper tier. Of course there were two Harlequins made use of to carry out this not very occult delusion ; but to us it was at once delicious and marvellous. Then, again, there was a gentleman who tried to read a book by the light of a candle placed on a table ; but the candle, table and all slowly rose from the PANTOMIMES PAST AND PRESENT. Ill stage close up to the arch of the proscenium. Then it as slowly descended, and the gentle- man opened his book again ; whereupon he, his volume and his chair to boot, all gravely rose nearly to the altitude of the ''flies." I saw the self-same and venerable trick performed in the year 1856 in the ''comic business" of a grand ballet at the Eoyal Opera House at Berlin ; and very possibly that identical trick was a com- mon one in the Eoman theatres of antiquity. As it happens, I chanced to be turning, the other day, over a file of newspapers for 1835, and in one of their number the writer, who criticised the Covent Garden pantomime, began by re- marking that " the genius of this kind of entertainment was at a rapid decline." " There is no use," continued the critic, " in deny- ing it. These fine scenes and splendid ' effects ' have played the very deuce. Harlequin thinks it unnecessary to exert himself ; he is bewildered by visions and panoramas, and has become anything but what he ought to be. What wonder, then, that degeneracy has also affected the Columbine, and that she, the tender, frightened little heart, no longer runs 112 THINGS AXD PEOPLE. hither and thither for protection and love, but assures herself on her own account, and is not afraid to rebuke the advances of gouty old aristocrats, as though she were sixty years of age instead of sixteen. That profligate wag, the Clown, no longer picks pockets with a gusto, nor looks those outrageous lies, nor laughs- as though he would shake his shoulders off. He merely makes respectable summersaults, and hopes that people will laugh at him." Furthermore, the censor of the Covent Grarden pantomime, the name of which he even disdains to give, complains that the spectacle included ''few tricks, fewer thumps, a singular lack of bumps, and little or no mirthful enjoyment.'' He sneered, too, at what was then the modern joke of the squeaking pig, and denounces allegories of gin-palaces starting suddenly out of dissipa- tion, outrage, poverty, and disease." Still he has a good word to say for a device in which the " Largest Turkey in Europe is being rescued from the hug of a Eussian Bear " by a broadside from an admirably modelled representation of H.M.S. Britannia. Looking through journal- istic strictures on pantomimes between 1835 and PANTOMIMES PAST AND PRESENT. 113 1850, one finds over and over again the same complaint of the sad degeneracy of these once mirthful Christmas spectacles, and bitter lamen- tations over the evanishment of the days of Joey Grrimaldi in Mother Goose. That renowned en- tertainment, which is said to have been the first pantomime ever seen by Lord Eldon, and which his lordship subsequently witnessed eleven times in succession, I have never read ; but I have before me a copy of a pantomime called Harle- qimi and Friar Baeon ; or, lite Brazen Head^ performed at Covent Garden Theatre on Boxing Night, 1820. The Pantaloon was the famous Barnes ; Miles, Friar Bacon s servant, afterwards Clown, was played by the great Joey himself ; and Fribble, the Page, afterwards Dandy Lover, was impersonated by the younger Grimaldi, whose wretched career and miserable end are so forcibly narrated in the ''Life of Joseph Grrimaldi,'' edited by Charles Dickens. That interesting work was illustrated by George Cruikshank, and, by an odd coincidence, the frontispiece of my copy of Harlequin Friar Bacon is a portrait of the original Joey," etched by Isaac Robert Cruikshank, George's father. i 114 THINGS AND PEOPLE. The unrivalled clown is represented in tlie act of opening a number of oysters from a barrel ; and the very way in w^liich he leers at the bivalves and the manner in which he brandishes an exag- gerated oyster-knife, at once suffices to convince you that the man had inherited from his Italian father the most subtle of mimetic powers. As to the opening " of Friar Bacon, it is about as stupid a production as it is possible to imagine ; while the comic business " comprises scenes of the "West Cliff, Brighton," the " Elephant and Castle," the Outside of a Lodging House and Snuff Shop," the ''Peacock, at Islington," ''Donnybrook Fair," ''Dublin Bay," and a grand transformation scene of the " Temple of the Brazen Head," with plenty of red and blue fire as a wind up, you may be sure. I may have seen a Christmas pantomime or two in London between 1835 and 1838; but I confess that I have but a very cloudy remem- brance of them, principally, I think, because my capacity of astonishment and delight were absorbed by a wonderful spectacle played, I think, at Drury Lane, and entitled, Za-Ze-Zi- Zo-Zoo, in which there was an animated game PANTOMIMES FAST AND PRESENT. 115 of dominoes, about one of the funniest stage devices that I ever saw. The animated dominoes, of course, afterwards joined in a game of leap- frog, which culminated in a chaotic revel, in which Double Blank took a flying leap over the back of Double Six. But now I come to a pantomime which, although I first saw it fifty-three years ago, is distinctly and still delightfully engraved on my mind. In 1839 I was a boy at school at Paris ; and one summer Sunday evening, having my ecveat, or ''pass," from college in my pocket, I was allowed, with my sister, who was finishing her education in the French capital, to visit, under matronly escort, Franconi's Winter Circus, high up on the Boulevards towards the Place de la Bastille, at v/hich theatre a wonderful pantomime /eerie called Zes Pilitles da Liable was just then sending all Paris wild with excitement. The piece was in five acts ; the authors were MM. Anicet-Bourgeois, Laloue, and Laurent ; and it was first produced in February. It was in July that I saw it, and it had been running ever since. Its ran amounted altogether to a i 2 116 THINGS AXD PEOPLE. thousand nights. The transformations in the Pilules da Biahle seemed to be innumerable ; although the plot was an exceedingly simple one, being founded on the misadventures of an old apothecary and his son-in-law, who through the five acts were continually searching for the heroine, who had been carried off by a dissipated personage, by the name of Babylas ; but it Avas the transformations that excited our Avonder, and threw us into transports of joy. Men were changed into turkeys, children into cats, wretched hovels into palaces blazing with gold and jewels ; while wooden razors which hung as signs over barbers' shops opened of their own accord to cut off the heads of passers-by. An Italian image-boy came on the stage with a tray of plaster casts on his head ; and one Magloire, who was a kind of clown, stole the images and replaced them with the severed heads which he had picked up. The Italian image-boy, suspecting naught, went on his way, but was pursued by a crowd, which, to defend himself, he pelted with the heads on his tray. A man was run over by a locomotive eno'ine — then an almost entire PANTOMIMES FAST AND PRESENT. 117 novelty in France ; his body was cut to pieces and magically put together again. A quack- salver brought forward a head of wood, and by the aid of a new pomatum made the hair, the beard, and the moustaches grow. Then there were the old tricks of the chairs and table which played at hide and seek ; of the beds which turned into baths of iced water, and of a cotton factory which changes into a madhouse of four storeys, out of every window of which a lunatic with a tall white night-cap popped his head. If Magloire halted in front of a cabaret and ordered a bottle of wine, the sign of the inn, Le More Couronne," became animated, jumped on to the table and emptied his glass ; while gigantic frogs issued from a neighbourhig pool and carried off the bottle. When he tried to dine at a cook shop, roast pigeons flew up from the dish and into the gaping mouth of a giant painted on the wall; raised pies burst asunder and disclosed fantastic animals making astound- ing grimaces. These and five hundred extrava- gances made the Pilules dit Biahle a world- famous pantomime ; and many of the tricks which were really original have long since 118 THINGS AND PEOPLE. become stock devices in modern comic business. This wondrous pantomime was revived in 1874 in Paris, at the great theatre of the Chatelet, but the management unwisely thought , that the old rough - and - tumble tricks and grotesque transformations were no longer up to date, or at least that it was necessary to supplement them by more spectacle, more tinsel and foil paper and coloured fires, and especially by many more pairs of feminine legs. The Pilules du Diahle gained in splendour, but lost in fun ; nor was the revival, on the whole, a long-continued success. It did not, at least, achieve the triumph which was the lot of Peaii cV Ane, of La BicJie au Bois, and especially of the famous Pied de Moidon. I have had a good deal to do in my working time with pantomimes. In 1846 at the old Princess's Theatre, Mr. John Medex Maddox being the lessee and manager thereof, I was employed as an assistant in the painting-room, as I have mentioned in the first chapter. I forget the name of the grand Christmas panto- mime produced in the winter of the year just named, but I know that I worked very hard in PANTOMIMES PAST AND PRESENT. 119 connection with it. One of the comic scenes was a tableau of the Arctic regions, which was meta- morphosed into a kitchen full of blazing fireplaces and cooks in white jerkins and caps. All the kitchen utensils, which were projected on a fiery background, had to cast the very deepest of shadows, which it was my business to delineate ; and I used up so many pots of sable colour in painting these shadows that I was known among my colleagues as the gentleman in black.'' I likewise helped to model all the pantomime masks, and to paint and gild the properties '' — technical training which stood me in very good stead many years afterwards, when I was examined as a witness in the great Belt libel case, and was asked somewhat insolently by one of the counsel whether I knew anything practically about the plastic modelling with regard to which I was being examined. I told the learned gen- tleman that I could model heads well enough, and would be charmed to model his — wig and all — if he liked. When I left the Princess's and Mr. Maddox, I drifted into journalism in a small way, but I had not lost my love for Clown, Pantaloon, 120 THINGS AND PEOPLE. and their f unniments ; and about 1848, Mr. Alfred Bunn being lessee and manager of the Theatre Eoyal, Drury Lane, I designed the masks and costumes for a pantomime called, I think, ''Harlequin Hogarth." Again, in 1851, the Princess's having passed out of the hands of Mr. Maddox and into those of Mr. Charles Kean, for that excellent actor and accomplished gentle- man I wrote, in conjunction with a brother long since deceased and Mr. George Ellis, the stage manager of the theatre, the opening of a pantomime called ffarlequin Billy Taylor, Oar scene painters were the Grieves ; our Clown was the admirable Flexmore ; our Pantaloon a very old pantomimic hand, Paulo ; our Columbine Miss Carlotta Leclercq; and a marvellously pretty little girl called Kate Terry played the figure- head of a mimic man-of-war, with a crew of small children dressed as tars, who sang " Rule Britannia," in the midst of coloured fires, while the bowsprit slowly descended to the level of the stage, and the charming little figure-head stepped forth as a fairy all white muslin and spangles, waved her tinsel wand, and brought about the Grand Transformation, followed by the '' rally " PANTOMIMES FAST AND FEES EN T. 121 and the comic business, in which one scene was the work of my brother and myself. It was the outside of a lodging-house by moonlight. Of course, Clown and Pantaloon were ''all over the place" with warming-pans and night-lights and other adjuncts for fun; and the scene wound up with a great concert of practical " cats on the roof, whose dia- bolical moll-rowings still ring in my ears. Charles Kean, who was a dry humorist, took great interest in this feline comedy ; and one day at rehearsal, while he was sitting at the back of the pit watching the scene, he called out to Mrs. Charles Kean, who was a splendid stage manageress, '' Ellen, there's a large tom cat close to the chimney, and he does not cock his tail correctly ; take him away and let me have another cat with a larger tail." I had nothing more to do with pantomimes until 1856, when during the disastrous manage- ment of Professor Anderson, the Wizard of the North," at Covent Grarden, soon after- wards to be destroyed by fire, I assisted the stage director, Mr. Augustus Harris — the father of Sir Augustus, the present lessee of the two 122 THINGS AND FEOPLE. national theatres ■ — in writing the rhymed- book " of a pantomime called Harlequin King Henry VIII. ; or, The Meld of Ike Cloth of Gold. Two years afterwards a new and very different field of pantomimic industry was opened to me. It became my duty to write the annual Boxing Night article on the Drury Lane panto^ mime for the Daily Telegraph ; and in the course of four-and-thirty years, allowing for occasional absence in foreign parts, I suppose that I have written some twenty yearly pantomime critiques. 123 CHAPTER XIV. OPERAS REMEMBERED. Maria di Rohan in 1817 — A Voice "like melted Butter " — Alboni — Artaxerxes — Musical Criticism in 1836 — The Lord of the Manor — Tom Thumh — The Qualier — Love in a Village — Guy Mannerlng — Hoi) Boy — The Anfujuary — John Barnet, Michael Balfe, and Vincent Wallace. One bright summer eveniDg, in the year 1847, it occurred to me, after I had been dining at the Garrick's Head Hotel, in Bow Street, Covent Garden — a tavern which has long since dis- appeared — that I had in my pocket a stall for the instant night's performance at the Eoyal Italian Opera — clearly not the existing palatial theatre, but the partially reconstructed and redecorated Covent Garden : a transformation from the old, or Kemble structure, effected by an Italian architect named Albano, and which was totally destroyed by fire after a masquerade given by Professor Anderson, in the year 1856. The opera, as I learned from the notice-board under the porbico, was Maria di Rohan, a production which ^ I take it, is scarcely very I'A THINGS AND PEOPLE. popular with modern opera-goers. I lived in Salisbury Street, in the Strand ; and, after debating for awhile whether I should see Maria di Rohan, or take a ramble through the streets, I elected the former course, hurried home, dressed, and in due time found myself in the splendid theatre, then under the managemeni either of Mr. Beale or of Mr. Delafield. The opera had already commenced ; and just as I took my seat there walked on to the stage a young lad}^ in male attire of the Louis Treize or early Louis Quatorze period. It was a front scene, and she had the whole of the space behind the footlights and the canvas flat " to herself. So soon as she began to sing, I remembered that I had seen her only a very short time before, at the opening of the Royal Italian Opera, in the opera of Semiramide, in which magnificent work she sustained the part of Arsace. I was listening to a voice of wonderful compass, including, so far as my ear taught me, notes far beyond the reach of the ordinary contralto. My next-door neigh- bour in the stalls, who, from his face and mien, I conjectured to be an officer in the OFEBAS REMEMBERED. 125 Gruards, expressed his opinion touching the delightful songstress with a terseness and lu- cidity which far surpassed my more technical appreciation. He remarked that the young lady's voice was " like melted butter — by Jove ! " It certainly was one of the richest, most unctuous, and yet vigorous voices I had ever hstened to. The song she sang was of a cavalier — herself — who, not wishing to be idle, paid for two entire months assiduous court to a fair and noble lady, who, however, vouch- safed such scant attention to his sighs and entreaties, that he might as well have tried to propitiate a rock. There was a refrain to the ditty, in which the disappointed swain expressed his opinion that, after all, austere beauties of the Lucretian type were rarely found. The en- chanting lyric and the more enchantiDg singer were quite enough for me. I wanted no more of Maria di Rohan that summer evening, so I hied me home, opened my paint-box, and made a sketch, in water-colours, of the handsome young lady in boy's clothes, with a voice, as the Gruardsman put it, like melted butter.'' Only the other day, rummaging among 126 THINGS AND PEOPLE. old-time papers in the drawers of a bureau, and judiciously burning a large proportion of the documents, I came across a water-colour drawing of a young lady in boy's clothes — a handsome brunette, somewhat inclined to embonpoint. She was clad in a pourpoint and hauts de chausses of black velvet, with black silk hose and shoes with rosettes. She had a deep, falling-collar of point lace and ample lawn sleeves and lace ruffles ; while in one hand she carried a slouched hat with sable plumes. Underneath I found three lines in Italian : Al Giudicar, Da quel che par, Son le Lucrezie rare a trovar ! " The writing was lamentably faded, and the first word was so blurred and indistinct that I could not precisely make out whether it was Al " or Non." The paper, too, was stained and crumpled ; and in the greys, with which I had touched up the black velvet costume and the plumes, I had incautiously mingled white lead instead of Chinese white. The lead had oxidised, and, where there should have been grey touches, OFEHAS EEMEMBEEED. 127 there were dull red ones. That is how Time uses us. We oxidise and oxidise into, at last, rustiest death. Some of the carnations also had fled from the comely damsel's countenance ; but enough of her traits remained to enable me to recognise them as the features of the handsome young lady whom I had listened to in the summer of 1847. I sent the drawing to an old friend of mine in Paris, who I knew enjoyed the acquaintance of a grande dame de par le monde who in 1847, at the Eoyal Italian Opera, captured all cultured London by her lyric talents and her gracious presence. It was Maria Alboni that I had heard in Maria di Rohan ; and I asked my friend in Paris to show the drawing to her, and ask her, if she ever sang nowadays the ditty with the burden telling how Lucre tias were rare to find. The little water-colour sketch served another purpose. It encouraged me to look back at all the operas that I could remember, and the outcome of the mental task is this chapter. In writing about Charles Dickens as I knew him, I mentioned the opera of the Village Co- quettes, only in so far as Dickens was associated with it ; but I had witnessed many other operas, 128 THINGS AND PEOPLE, both English and Italian, before the work, of which Hullah was the composer and Dickens the writer of the libretto, was produced. I should say that a very large number of the lyrical pro- ductions to which I intend to call brief attention are at the present day scarcely known, even by name, to the great majority of patrons of the lyric stage. For example, in October, 1837, I saw at the St. James's, Dr. Arne's opera of Artaxerxes. John Braham, then nearly sixty -two, but still in splendid form, as a tenor equally vigorous and mellifluous, was Artabanes, and Mr. Bennett, of Covent Garden, Arbaces. The Mandane of the evening was a debutante, Miss Eainforth, who was at once acknowledged as a peeress of the two then most conspicuous j??^;^^ donne of English opera. Miss Shirreff* and Miss Romer. In Artaxerxes the contralto part was played by Miss Julia Smith, but I am not ashamed to confess that I have but a very indistinct re- membrance of Miss Julia Smith's vocalisation, or, indeed, of her individuality, save that she was young and good-looking and inclined to plumpness, and that she wore a very gorgeous OPERAS B^EMEAfBEBED. 129 costume, comprising an exceptionally baggy pair of Turkish trousers of crimson satin with gold spangles. Musical critics in 1836 were not quite so fully endowed with good mauners as are their successors in 1894; and it is instructive to note in a contemporary criticism on the performance, and in so grave and scholarly a journal as the Examiner, the following remarkable appreciation of Miss Julia Smith (Artaxerxes) and her sister : — There are two stout Miss Smiths at the theatre, and one of these Miss Smiths acted Artaxerxes. This lady has a little fat person and a little fat, reedy voice, the effects of which approach occasionally the ludicrous. The two fat Miss Smiths sing little fat duets together very prettily ; but as their two pursey little voices do not make up one good voice, they ought never to be separated. The American motto is strongly exemplified in these ladies, and we advise them to pay every attention to it : E plurihiis itmtm. It should be a double-barrelled engagement." I may mention that the sisters Smith were nieces of the Countess of Essex — the adorable Kitty " Stephens, whose face still delightfully haunts the collector of old prints, as it beams from out j 130 THINGS AND PEOPLE. a group of spectators, in the engraving after Harlowe's once popular picture of the Trial Scene in Henry the JEiglitli — better known as the Kemb^e Family." I know sorrowfully well that I am talking ancient history ; and even professional musicians may fail to be interested by the knowledge that in the orchestra, on the first night of Arfaxerxes, the once renowned Harper pla3^ed the trumpet, and Grattan Cooke played the hautboy. Grattan Cooke was for many years a favourite performer at the Philhar- monic Concerts, and was afterwards bandmaster of one of the cavalry regiments of the Household Brigade. For the rest, although Dr. Arne's Artaxerxes has long since practically fallen into oblivion, and I suppose would be utterly unsuit- able for performance on the modern stage, I hope that it is not impertinent to hint that this forgotten work contains a large number of exquisitely beautiful melodies. It is six- and-fifty years ago ; yet often when I am at work the now cheering, now soothing, airs return to me with all the freshness of a new- gathered violet in spring ; and I find myself humming The Soldier Tired/' or Mild as OFERAS FiEMEMBERED. 131 the Moonbeams," or Thy Father, Away ! " or Water Parted." English operatic managers used to do very strange things occasionally, more than half a century since, in the way of interpolating compo- sitions alien from the operas which they brought out. Thus, in Mozart's Marridge of Figaro at Covent Garden, in 1827, in which my mother enacted the Countess Ahnaviva, Madame Vestris, who played Susanna, w^as positively allowed to introduce the pretty, frivolous ballad I've been Eoaming ; " and in Artaxerxes, at the St. James's, Handel's pathetic song, Tears such as Tender Fathers shed," was foisted on Arne's score, while the recitative, Dear and Beloved Shade," was the composition of Mr. (afterwards Sir) Henry R. Bishop, the composer, or at least the adapter, of the melody of ''Home, Sweet Home." To complete the tableau of lyrical incongruities at the St. James's, the manager described Artaxerxes as '' a Serious Burletta." Probably he had no thought of Dante's Divine Comedy in his mind when he affixed the epithet of serious to a bur- letta which is essentially a comic, and even farcical, composition ; but he was compelled to i2 132 THINGS AND PEOPLE, give it the ridiculous title by the then tyran- nical and absurd system of theatrical licens- ing, which forbade the performance of operas exceeding one act in length save at certain privileged houses. And now let me say a few words about certain English operas, short, merry, and spark- ling, of which the fathers and mothers of elderly readers w^ere once enthusiastically fond, but which I suppose are very rarely performed in an epoch that prefers the loose and lively operas hoaffes of Offenbach, Lecocq, and Herve to the innocent, tuneful, but, it must be owned, some- what ''pigtail" compositions of Charles Dibdin, the elder Hook, and their school. Did you ever hear of, or did you ever see, an opera called The Lord of the Manor, the libretto of which was altered by Charles Dibdin from a drama by General Burgoyne, of Saratoga fame, and the father of the valiant Field-Marshal Sir John Bur- goyne ? In this opera, the plot of which bears a slight resemblance to Farquhar's Recriiitiny Officer, there is a boisterous, riotous, drunken baggage -waggon woman called Moll Flaggon, as nnlike our modern type of a vivandiere as a wild OPERAS EEMEMBEBED. 133 boar is unlike a sucking-pig. Moll Flaggon used to wear semi-military costume — a scarlet coatee with worsted embroidery, a quilted skirt that reached no lower than the knee, a tucked up apron (from one pocket of which protruded a brandy bottle), blue worsted hose, and clouted shoes. In the intervals of her ribaldry, her roaring ditties, and her cellarflap " dances, she smoked a short pipe. Moll Flaggon was always played by a man; and I have had the advantage of seeing the edifying part performed by the admirable comedian John Pritt Harley. I can hear now the burden of one of the songs he sung — Kiss and drink But never think, 'Tis all the same to-morrow." Harley also played, about the same time, the role of Lord Grrizzle in Fielding's burlesque of Ihm Tlimnh the Great, and, not inappropriately, called at the St. James's a ''musical burletta." The purport and significance of Fielding's Tom Thmib, as a political satire, had been forgotten, even in the reign of William IV. ; but the piece was a very droll one, and for awhile large 134 THINGS AND PEOPLE. audiences flocked to see the extravaganza, to listen to the witty dialogue and the tuneful songs sung by the dramatis person(2. But who remembers the Princess Huncamunca and her famous scena beginning ''Then Tremble all who Weddings ever made, and Tremble more who did this Match persuade " ? Who remembers the duet between Noodle and Doodle — either the Noodle or the Doodle being in 1836 a young gentleman by the name of Alfred Wigan — and who preserves any definite recollection of Grizzle's doleful song after he is mortally wounded, '' My Body is a Bankrupt's Shop, my grim Creditor is Death"? He died superbly— he could have given points," even in this regard, to Mr. Lionel Brough ; and the audience used to roar when Harley, couchant on the stage, dragged himself to the footlights, borrowed a snuff-box from Mr. George Sants- bury, the leader of the orchestra, inhaled a parting pinch, and then rolling over and over, gave up the ghost with a sepulchral croak. There was the opera of The Quaker, too. I can scarcely persuade myself that the charming air, When the Lads of the Village," is wholly ignored at the present time ; surely it must be OPERAS REME3IBERED. 135 sung occasionally at village entertainments ; but as for the opera itself, I am afraid that it is as dead as Queen Anne. And Rosina," and ''No Song, no Supper," with the indignant air of the discontented wife, Go, Greorge, I can't endure you '' ? And the delightful Love in a Village ? ■ Are there any modern young ladies who ever warble the sparkling duet in the First Act, ''Hope, thou Nurse of young Desire " ? Would the humours of the statute fair suit the fn-cle-sieele taste ? I have seen Keeley play Hodge ; and I have heard that very capable English tenor, Allen, as young Meadows, sing, " How much superior Beauty awes " ? And how long, I should like to know, is it since the comic English opera of Midas has been popular on the boards ? Midas, with the rattling song for Apollo, " Pray, Goody, please to moderate the Rancour of j^our Tongue." These simple-minded English operas, which were not very scientific, possibly not very artistic, musically speaking, but the words in the songs of which were not always sickly namby-pamby, continued to decline in public favour throughout 136 THINGS AND PEOPLE. tlie 'thirties and for about five years in the next decade. I just recollect witnessing, at the English Opera House (now the Lyceum), a hybrid kind of opera, candidly confessed by the librettist to be only a new broad, comic extravaganza entertainment, entitled Giovamii m Londoii ; or,, the Libertine Reclaimed. It had first been pro- duced at Drury Lane. Don Giovanni was of course played by the incomparable Eliza Vestris, who sent the town half crazy by her appearance in a peach-coloured tunic edged with silver embroidery, white silk tights, and half boots of the same hue as her tunic ; while a magnificent diamond star sparkled in her black velvet cap with the white plume. Rob Roy, dramatically speaking a pale parody of Sir Walter's novel, was brought out as a musical drama in three acts ten years before I was born. The cast at Covent Garden in 1818 comprised that respectable tragedian, Mr. Egerton, as Sir Fred- erick Vernon, Liston as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Miss Stephens as Diana Vernon, and Mrs. Bishop as Katty, whilst Mrs. Egerton was the first of Helen Macgregors, a part played in after OPEEAS REMEMBERED. 137 years by, among others, Mrs. W. West, Mrs. Warner, and my mother. Another operatic version of a novel by the then Great Unknown was Gic^ Mannerivg ; or, the Gipsy h Prophecy, which production has happily come down to our time, mainly owing, I should say, to the charm of Bishop's music and the admirable acting o£ Miss Grenevieve Ward as Meg Merrilies, just as ''Home, Sweet Home,'' sung by Miss Maria Tree, made the fortune of Howard Payne's melo- drama of Clari, the Maid of Milan. The original cast of Guy Mannering at Covent Garden was a wonderfully strong one. Brahm and Sinclair alternately played Harry Bertram; Liston was Dominie Sampson, and Emery (the grandfather of Miss Winifred Emery) was Dandie Dinmont. Franco, a boy, was played by ''Master" Barnett ; but whether the youth at Covent Garden subse- quently blossomed into Morris Barnett, the creator of the pathetic hero in Monsieur Jacques, or John Barnett, the composer of The Mountain Sylph, I am not aware. The part of Gilbert Glossin fell to that very fine actor Blanchard, and Lucy Bertram was impersonated by the enchanting Miss Stephens. No, I feel sure. 138 THIXQS AXD PEOPLE. that "The Winds whistle cold" and the "Chough and Crow " have not lost their hold on English ears and hearts ; but I am afraid that no modern manager would be so adventurous as to produce T/ie Antiquary, a musical pla}^ in three acts, in Avhich Miss Stephens played Miss Wardour ; Mrs. Faucit, Elspeth ; Mr. Liston, Jonathan Oldbuck; Emery, Edie Ochiltree; and Blanchard, Caxon, Lovel was plaj^ed by Duruset; but, for all that, the music of the songs, glees, and duets was by Bishop. The musical play of Tlie Antiquary would have, I am afraid, a very cold reception were it presented at the Lyric or the Prince of Wales's, and derision rather than applause might be the guerdon of the glee "Merrily Sounds the Dinner Bell." Another of the Waverley Novels, The Heart of Mid- lothian, was brought out at the Surrey, and was only qualified as a melodramatic romance ; but it was plentifully sprinkled with songs and choruses. Effie Deans sang, Jeanie Deans sang, Madge Wildfire sang, and Fitzwilliam as Dum- biedikes favoured the audience with Burns's "Willy Wastle Dwelt on Tweed." All these operas and quasi-operas were destined to be 0PEEA8 REMEMBERED. 139 eclipsed by three very bright planets which arose in the English dramatic firmament — John Barnett, Michael Balfe, and Vincent Wallace. Balfe was an intimate friend of onr family ; he, his excellent wife, his two daughters, and his little son lived in Conduit Street, Regent Street, and, between tlie years 1835 and 1839,1 and my sister were almost daily visitors in the Balfe household. Louisa and Victoria Balfe were our playmates. Louisa, I believe, died not long after her marriage, but I was privileged to meet Victoria in 1865 at Madrid. She had been the wife of Sir John Crampton, sometime Minister at Washington and at Madrid ; but Vicky," as I used to call her in her childhood, when I visited her in her sumptuous mansion in the Spanish capital, had become the spouse of the Duke of Frias, a Spanish grandee of ancient lineage, who was the son of that Duke of Frias who came to England as Ambassador-Extra- ordinary from Spain at the coronation of Queen Victoria. 140 CHAPTEE XV. SONGS THAT COME BACK TO ME. Rossini and the excellent M. La-da-di-da-de-da-de-day " — A Memory for Tunes — Arabic, Russian, and Spanish Melodies — A Phenomenon of the Musical Memory : the Probable Ex- planation — " The Evening G-un " — French Melodies — Eno'lish Ballads and Choruses — " She Wore a Wreath of Roses " and its Composer — G-eorge Linley — Lover's Ballads — Songs to be avoided. EossiNi, tlie composer, who had a spice of malice in his humour, professed to be perma- nently unable to recollect the name of Sir Henry Bishop ; and whenever he met an English friend with musical connections he would ask him, And how goes the health of the excellent M. La-da-di-da-de-da-de-day ? " and so proceeded to hum right through the melody of ''Home, Sweet Home.'' It is possible, I take it, to be utterly ignorant of the art and science of music, and yet to have an accurate and copious musical memory. I was always passionately fond of music, and, in my boyhood, used pathetically to entreat that I might be taught the tuneful art ; SONGS THAT COME BACK TO ME. 141 but I was destined for other pursuits ; and I only preserve, now, an abiding love for operatic music and a curiously retentive remembrance of tbe tunes which were long, long ago familiar to me. Following the Emperor Napoleon III. and his gorgeous train through Algeria some eight- and-twenty years ago, I heard one night a wild chorus sung by Arabs in a coffee-house at Blidah. Being no Arabic scholar, I could make nothing of the words which the men in the burnouses chanted ; but the tune remained for many years latent in my memory ; and it came back to me unbidden, one day last year, when I had purchased a guitar for a youthful relative who is an adept on that delightful instrument. The melody haunted me so persistently for three days that, at length, I sent for a professor of music, who obligingly put down the notes as I sang them and welded the wild chorus into musical symmetry and artistic form. I thought, while I was about it, that he might also note down a very touching, tune- ful melody I used to hear in Eussia, sung to the music of the balalaika, more than 142 THINGS AND PEOPLE. five-and-tliirty years ago. It is called the Yemschick Song ; and to me tlie oddest circumstance connected with this well-known Muscovite ditty is, that while during the twenty years which intervened between my fir^t and my second visit to the land of the Czar, I entirely forgot the soft-flowing Euss which I had acquired during my first six months' sojourn — with the exception, always, that I could still write the characters of the Russian alphabet — yet I remembered the words of T'^ot net poitti celo bolscJioia ; " although their meaning had become quite lost to me. The musical professor took down the Temschick Song ; " and before he left, I pressed him to prick down '' — to use Mr. Pepys' term — a certain Spanish peasant choral song, the music of which, after a long lapse of years, I remembered imperfectly, but of the words of which I could only remember some- thing like this, Carlos es rejin.'' To what North Iberian patois these words belong I do not know, but they linger in my mind. Very often we yield to the dim persuasion that we are listening to a strain of music, SONGS THAT GOME BAGK TO ME. 143 which we have no consciousness of having heard at any period in our lives ; and this phenomenon, the experience of which is com- mon, I should say, to the bulk of humanity, has often engendered in some minds the fanciful theory that the mysterious melody, which we think has been audible to us, pertains to some previous stage of existence. I would rather favour the thought, that the vaguely- imagined tune was one that was sung to us in our very earliest infancy ; but that, in many cases, our harmonic memory is not retentive enough to have preserved the definite apprehension of the tune. Abundance of songs must have been sung to us in our cradles — abundance of tunes must have been played to us on the piano, by those who loved us in our infancy ; yet, I should say, there must be very few children of humanity who have a definite idea of what they heard, or what they saw, when they were, say, twelve months old. If those whose memory for melod}^ is vigorous and conservative exercised their faculty by repeating all the tunes which have impressed themselves on their minds — say from the age of four or six^ — such reminiscent 1^^ TIIIXGS AXD PEOPLE. monsters, as I may call tliem, would become intolerable bores both to themselves and to their friends. The charm of musical memory consists to me, so I have always thought, in the melody fading away for a time into apparent extinction, and of its suddenh^ and beautifully starting up before one unsummoned, but always welcome, at a period wholly unexpected. You are riding, I will sa}^ on the sea-front at Brighton. There is a w^onderful sunset of crimson and gold and orange, and the dying orb flashes in splendid profusion on the window-panes of houses pro- jecting, at right angles, from the line of buildings on the front. Wh}' should you hear, in the inner chambers of your mind, the booming reverberation of a cannon ; and why should there come back to you the touching air of a ballad called The Evening Grun," composed, if I re- member aright, by a certain Mr. John Lodge EUerton, full sixty years ago? That ballad visited me only yesterday; and the fascination which exists in these unlooked-for^ but fondly cherished, recurrences of sweet sounds, is won- derfully enhanced by the circumstance that the SONGS THAT GOME BAGK TO ME. 145 song brings back to you the scenes and the people of the bygone, and enables you to recall still more and more melodies, associated with the things and the creatures always lovable to you, and which you will love till you die. It is sixty years since ; and I am mentally transported to a drawing-room in Cannon Place, Brighton; and I can hear ''The Bay of Dublin," and ''Entreat Me not to Leave Thee,'' and "Lascia ch'io piango " ; and, with the eyes of my soul, I can see the beautiful mother of the present Marquess of Dufferin. I can see Caroline Norton and Lady Combermere, and Harriet, Duchess of St. Albans, and Angela Burdett Coutts — the last quite a young girl — and Malibran, and Paganini, in his sitting-room at the Old Ship. It was only the golden sunset, and the remembered air of " The Evening Gun," that conjured up all these phantoms of a happy past. Please do not think that I intend to be studiously sentimental. Can any of my readers remember a wonderfully funny " society " song, that used to be sung close upon six decades ago, beginning, " So Miss Myrtle is Going to Marry " ? The words were as humorous as the melody was vivaciously k 146 THINGS AND PEOPLE. tuneful. It was a lady-critic. I tliink, who was supposed to be telling some feminine friend of the approaching marriage of Miss Myrtle, and in successive stanzas she gently, oh^ so gently ! insinuated that the young lady and her jioMce were of hopelessly contrary dispositions, and that they would lead a cat-and-dog life ; each verse, however, concluding with a deliciously spiteful refrain to the effect that Miss Myrtle was a charming woman, and her future spouse a most fortunate man. As I hum the air now, there comes to me from France, straight as the railway line from Petersburg to Moscow — did not the Tsar Nicholas rule it with a pencil on a map, when the engineers asked him what course the line should follow ? — a sparkling ditty called " Les Compliments de Normandie^' which was the rage in Paris early in the reign of Louis Philippe. I can see, even now, the lithographed drawing on the title-page, representing two pretty peasant women in sabots and lofty cauchoises, who are complimenting one another on their good looks and their smart caps and ribbons, but in whom there is a manifest undercurrent of envy, hatred, SONGS THAT GOME BAGK TO ME. 147 malice, and all uncharitableness. The air is throughout lively and catching, but it rarely abides with me long ; since it has to yield to a stern, austere, menacing, tragic melody, which, at the epoch I speak of, was sung by every musical amateur in Paris who was endowed with a strong baritone, or even a bass voice. The song was called V Ange Dechu^' and related the awful remorse of a Spirit who had been appointed Gruardian Angel to an enfant de la terre, a pretty girl, to whom he had im^prudently made love. Mr. Thomas Moore might have approved of these angelical flirtations ; but the French poet took a different view of the transaction. Of course no reminiscences of melody of the Louis Philippe period can be destitute of a recol- lection of a certain patriotic song entitled La Parisienne," now, I should say, wholly forgotten in the land of its birth. The Citizen King, shortly after the Eevolution of July, forbade the performance of La Marseillaise " ; so his sub- jects had to be content with an illegitimate and truncated parody of the magnificent anthem of Eouget de I'lsle — La Parisienne.'' It was a stimulating air enough, but a plagiarism k 2 148 THINGS AND PEOPLE. as well as a parody. The music was com- posed by Auber, and the words were by Casimir Delavigne, the author of Louis XI." Strange to say, although I can remember, by a strong mental effort, the airs of nearly all the comic operas of the epoch to w^hich I allude — the Domino Noir, the Pre anx Clercs, the Am-, bassadrice, the Postilion de Longjumeau, and many more, the tunes very rarely come back to me unasked ; possibly for the reason that when I heard them as a schoolboy I was almost alone in Paris ; and the operatic airs had thus no close association with scenes or per- sons that I care to recall. It was different witli that gruesome tune the Ange Becliu!' It chanced that about 1843, when I went to school in England, the head of the remarkable Pesta- lozzian establishment at Turnham Grreen, who tried his best to give me an elementary training in the English language, was endowed with a very powerful bass voice, and had a French wife ; and a certain way to gain his favour was to ask liim to sing V Ange Dechu when he had a little leisure. I really liked the song ; although I must own that I was quite as partial SONGS THAT COME BACK TO ME. 149 to the large slice of plum, cake wliicli was gener- ally the reward of a request that my esteemed preceptor would sing the dismal ditty over again. Long before this period my ears had gar- nered in, for careful preservation in mental silos, a number of delightful English ballads and choruses. I wonder if many elderly people at this time of day remember a rattling chorus in Balfe's Sw^e of Rochelle, beginning, " Swearing Death to Traitor Slave, Hands we Clasp, Swords we Draw ; Heaven defend the True and Brave. Vive le Roi ! Vive le Roi'' ! I believe that this chorus was chiefly, in the first instance, engraved on my mind by the circumstance that the English choristers at Drury Lane usually pronounced, as true Britons should, Vive le Roi as Yive le Raw " ! But, at all events, the tune itself riveted itself in my recollection and has never been removed therefrom. I will say nothing about John Barnett's lovely opera of The Mountain Syl/ph, because I have reason to believe that the dulcet melodies in that produc- tion are familiar to amateurs of the existing generation, and that the trio — if it be a trio — 150 THINGS AND PEOPLE. of the Magic-wove Scarf" is still occasionally warbled in musical circles. Then, again, there must be, surely, up-to- date young ladies who sing the enchanting ballad of " She Wore a Wreath of Eoses." I remember Mr. Thomas Haynes Bayly, the writer of the words of that delicious, if some- what namby-pamby, ballad, well. The com- poser of the music was the Eev. Joseph Philip Knight, with whom I was also acquainted. Mr. T. H. Bayly was a dandy, who wore white kid gloves in the day-time. He was a gentleman ; had been a man of fortune ; but I suspect that, like Dogberry, he had had losses. Another composer of English ballads has, I hope, not yet drifted down the river of Lethe. This was George Linley, whom I remember as a robust, middle-aged gentleman in the early 'forties, who had married a daughter of the eminent Orient- alist, Dr. Gilchrist. George Linley had been a captain in the Militia, and used to tell us stories — to me deeply interesting — of his exploits in suppressing certain rioters known as Luddites. I scarcely think that he was a very scientific SONGS THAT GOME BACK TO ME. 151 musician ; but his beautiful melodies in the ballads ''Constance" and ''The Spirit of Love" return to me repeatedly in the night-season. He was not very richly remunerated by the music publishers for his always popular com- positions. " Constance " had an immense sale, and " The Spirit of Love " may be sung yet for aught I know ; but for the first of these ditties I am afraid that poor Greorge did not get more than five-and-twenty pounds. Well, Crouch did not make a mint of money by " Kathleen Mavourneen." Naturally, "Kathleen" brings back to my memory some of the ballads of Samuel Lover. As Mr. Ashby Sterry has recently pointed out in the columns of an illustrated newspaper, the gifted Irish- man in question was not only a skilled musician, but a poet, a novelist, a painter of miniatures, and an expert etcher; he illustrated his own novels of " Handy Andy " and " Eory O'More," the last of which was dramatised, I think, at the Adelphi. He composed the music for a song with the same title as the drama; but few people — even Irishmen, I should say — sing " Rory O'More " now. On the other 152 THINGS AXn FEOFLE. hand, ''The Four-leaved Shamrock" should still retain its popularity ; and a very frequent noc- turnal visitor to me is the air of another of Lover's ballads, The Low-backed Car/' a won- derfully ''lilting" tune, which has an additional liok with my memory, owing to the fact that Lover's words were amusingly parodied at the height of the Crimean war in a poem by Eobert Brough, called " The Low-bred Czar." Here is one of the verses : In battle's wild commotion The fiercest man of war Will spare the child, and sword defiled By woman's blood abhor. But Nick (the word describes him), Unmoved by tear or shriek, The child will slay, its mother flay, If she dares a w^ord to speak To disparage the low-bred Czar. The whole forty thieves in a jar Xot a tithe nor a toll Of the ^'illainous soul Could express of the low-bred Czar. Curious to remember, our then good allies the French were, in the year 1855, of precisely the same mind as John Bull as to the amiable moral character of the Czar Nicholas of Russia. SONGS THAT COME BACK TO ME. 153 Going back, for an instant, a few 5^ears, I take it for granted that " Through the Wood, Through the Wood " and I'd be a Butterfly " have not yet been forgotten : but I am gravely doubtful as to whether many persons recollect that once tremendous favourite, Oh, Give me Back My Arab Steed." The music to Mrs. Hemans' ballads is, of course, as well remembered as the poems themselves, and are still the joys of quiet households ; but I candidly admit that I do my best to avoid recalling the almost sublime Burial in the- Desert " and the magnificent Pilgrim Fathers.'' I strive to banish them, because they fill me with an intense and almost overwhelming melancholy. It is good to be serious on occasion ; but you can be serious without being sad. With many other sym- pathisers with a certain fat knight — I always think most shamefully and ungratefully treated by Henry V., who, so soon as he ascended the throne, turned prig and moralist, and gave the cold shoulder to his former boon companions — it strikes me that I was born about three o'clock in the afternoon, with a white head and somewhat 154 THINGS AND PEOPLE. of a rotund stomach, and although I may have lost the best notes in my voice in the halloaing and singing of anthems/' I like to remember tunes that are joyous, and not those which, although artistically preferred, give me the blues. Felicia Hemans was a true poetess, but she seems to me to have been a hopeless pessimist. 155 CHAPTEE XVI. PICTURES THAT HAUNT ME. Pictures Recalled by Association — Jack Sheppard, with a Difference — Cruikshank's Presentment of the Housebreaker — A Portrait at Washington — G-uido's "Beatrice Cenci" — Laying a Ghost — Valdes Leal's Dead Prelate " — G-ruesome War Pictures — Jan Van Beers — The " Operating Theatre " of the Inquisition at Madrid — John Martin's Big Pictures — Hablot Knight Browne's "John G-ilpin " — Turner's Paintings — Two Works in Distemper. You can be haunted by a picture, just as you can be haunted by a melody ; and pictorial appa- ritions are continually rising before my mind's eye : although I suspect that I should experience terrible difficulty were I to endeavour to enu- merate consecutively the conspicuous features of even a dozen of the annual Exhibitions of the Eoyal Academy. Pictures, to my mind, should come up unbidden and unexpected ; but, as a rule, one can trace the mental appearance of the phantoms to some association of their subjects with a passage in a book or newspaper which you are reading, or even to a figure or a face 156 THINGS AND PEOPLE. which yon fancy that yon have seen before in the flesh, bnt which, when yon delve a Kttle into yonr memory, yon find that yon have seen only on canvas. For example, retnrning from Rome at the beginning of March,1892, I noticed, while the Inggage was being examined in the horribly uncomfortable Custom House at Ven- timiglia, an individual whose visage immediately conjured up a portrait which I had seen some fourteen years ago in the bar of an hotel or tavern up an entry somewhere off* Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, in the district of Columbia, U.S.A. The person who had attracted my atten- tion on the Eiviera was a man about thirty years of age, high-shouldered, bull-necked, with very large staring brown eyes, a heavy jaw, and somewhat sensuous look. His forehead was low, his hair dark and unkempt, and his cheeks and chin presented unmistakable signs that, for some days, possibly a week, his face had known no barber's shear. To judge from the short, much- patched and cobbled blue blouse which he wore, he was presumably a Frenchman of the peasant or labourer order ; he was a third-class passenger, PICTURES THAT HAUNT ME. 157 and his belongings consisted of a large number of bundles, which, on being untied by the douaniers, presented a curious collection of rags, bones, woollen socks, and sausages, together with an empty bird-cage and a frying pan. As I looked at him he underwent, to my mind, a transformation. The pale, unshaven face, the unkempt locks, the low forehead, the heavy maxillaries, the protruding brown eyes re- mained; but the blouse, the wide trousers, and the wooden sabots vanished, and were replaced by an early eighteenth century dress which had once been fine enough, but had become woefully tarnished and shabby. At once I exclaimed to myself, That is Jack Sheppard, painted by Sir James Thornhill, at the time when the notorious housebreaker was lying in the condemned hold, Newgate," and brought to my notice, I believe, as I have mentioned in an earlier chapter, by Mr. Bayard when I was at W ashington. It is pretty well known by this time that the portrait of Jack Sheppard, with which we are all familiar in Greorge Cruikshank's illustrations of a very exciting, but very mischievous, romance by Harrison Ainsworth, is a wholly imaginary 158 THINGS AND PEOPLE. conception. Jack was not a dashing young fellow with a bullet head and closely- cropped hair; he v/as an uncouth, vulgar, crapulous miscreant. Nor is there any proof of the story told by Mr. Harrison Ains worth, that Sir James Thorn- hill, when he visited Newgate to paint the portrait of the ruffian who was so soon to make his exit from the world at Tyburn, was accom- panied by his youthful son-in-law, William Hogarth. 1 do not think that the illustrious English painter in question ever made graphic mention of Sheppard ; although in one of his early engravings there is an allusion to another noted prison-breaker, a chimney-sweep named John Hall, whose exploits appear to have suggested the revoltingly dramatic ballad of Sam Hall," which was once a popular music- hall ditty. I have compared my memory of the Washington picture with an engraved portrait of Sheppard which I find in the Criminal Recorder," a precursor of the ''Newgate Calen- dar," the Chronicles of Crime," and cognate works, which was published in 1804, and that portrait precisely agrees with the Washington PICTURES THAT HAUNT MU, 159 one as I remember it ; only the malefactor repre- sented in the Criminal Eecorder " is clean shaven. That circumstance strengthens my belief that the Washington picture is a genuine one. Loaded as he was with heavy irons, Jack could scarcely have shaved himself; and there would have been great risk in allowing the prison barber to shave him, as possibly the desperado might have tried to cheat the gallows by jobbing his throat against the blade of the razor. Be it as it may, I never open Ainsworth's novel — for the sake of George Cruikshank's illustrations — without recalling that picture at Washington ; but I am wholly unable to account for the curious resemblance between the portrait which I saw in the Federal capital and the man in the blouse whom I met for a moment at Ven- timiglia, and who, very probably, was no house- breaker, but a thoroughly respectable member of society, although unblessed by capricious Fortune. Having travelled a good deal in many parts of the world, in the course of nearly two genera- tions, I have naturally paid frequent visits to the great Continental picture galleries. I 160 THINGS AND FEOFLE. believe tliat I am ardently fond of art, and I hope that I shall never cease to dwell with en- thusiastic admiration on the masterpieces of the greatest painters the world has ever seen ; yet, strangely enough, very few of those masterpieces haunt me — that is to say, start up, as I put it at the beginning of this chapter, unexpected and unbidden. The reason for this may be that I live in the midst of engravings and illustrated books and photographs by the thousand, and that scarcely a day passes without my turning over portfolios and volumes full of prints, and rummaging in photographic albums, in order to rub up my memory of the triumphs of design, composition, and colour, which have passed before my eyes. But these memories are not ghosts. Unless you are a professed ghost-raiser, like the Witch of Endor, phantoms should come upon you unawares, and should so depart. I have the honour of the acquaintance of a lady who complains that she is haunted by a portrait painted by Guido Eeni, which she saw in a certain palace at Eome, and which the catalogue says is a picture of Beatrice Cenci ; it being, PICTURES THAT HAUNT ME. 161 however, no more a counterfeit presentment of that nnhappy young person than it is of Madame de Pompadour or of Nell Grwynne. Guido's pic- ture is that of a girl of fifteen. Her complexion is not very fresh-coloured ; still the features of the maiden in Guido's portrait bear no signs whatever of the horrible agony which Beatrice had undergone day after day in the chamber of torture. The real Beatrice Cenci, as a learned Italian Professor has lately proved to demon- stration, was two-and-twenty years of age when she was executed. She was not very good- looking ; and she was the mother of a bouncing boy, in whose favour she made a will. Still, my lady friend complains that the eyes, the wonderful eyes of Guido's model — who was, it is conjectured, a young Greek, his slave — followed her about the gallery where she first saw it, and continued to pursue her, in an uncomfortably haunting manner, long after she had returned to England. I told her that I had once been haunted by those eyes, just as she had been ; but that I had contrived to lay the ghost in the Eed Sea, by the adoption of a very simple expedient. Every time that I / 162 THINGS AND PEOPLE. journey to Eome I buy a copy in oil of the world-famous portrait, taking care that thirty francs shall be the maximum price which I pay for it. About a dozen of these effigies, unframed, stand side by side on the top of a bookcase about breast high in my work-room. I raise my eyes, now, from my desk to look upon these apocryphal Beatrices ; and the original has long since ceased to haunt me. Familiarit}^ with the ghost breeds not always contempt, but absence of astonish- ment or terror. If you really saw an apparition of Anne Boleyn, as she was nonsensically said to be haunting Hampton Court Palace some little time since, with her head under her arm, you would, on the first appearance of such a phan- tom, shake in your shoes with horror and alarm ; but if the severed head were a pretty one, and the decollated Queen called on you every afternoon, it would not be long before you asked her to tea. Of all the pictures by the great Spanish masters which I have feasted my eyes upon dur- ing three voyages in North and Southern Spain, there is only one that haunts me, and, I am sorry to say, in a highly disagreeable manner. This PIG TUBES THAT HAUNT ME. 163 picture is in the Church of La Caridad, at Seville — an almshouse for poor, old, and chiefly bed- ridden men — which, founded in 1578, was rebuilt in 1661 by Don Miguel de Manara Vicentelo de Lara, who, in youth, was so terrible a profligate that he has been supposed to be the prototype of Moliere's and Mozart's hero, Don Juan Tenorio. He abandoned his wicked ways, however, and made a good end of it. The church is full of splendid paintings, among which are a magnificent Infant Saviour," a St. John," and a San Juan de Dios," by Murillo, the last-named picture being fully equal to Eembrandt at his best. Then, by the same master, there is the wondrous Loaves and Fishes,'' and the Moses Striking the Eock," which, in every one of its accessories, is so mar- vellously suggestive of intense thirst that the Spaniards call the picture '' La Sed." Bat the painting that haunts me is the Dead Prelate," by one Valdes Leal, which has been qualified as a ''putrid" picture, and which Murillo said he could never look at without holding his nose. It is, indeed, an absolutely sickening presentment of death and corruption, mingled with gorgeously /2 164 THINGS AND PEOPLE. painted accessories of gold and silver work and robes of lustrous fabric. Gro where I may, and strive as mucb as I do to summon pleasant and cheerful images, that awful charnel-house dead prelate rises up periodically to fill me with horror and loathing. These pictorial ghosts are only matters of continuously associated thought. While Yaldes Leal and his putrid " picture momentarily occupy my mind, my physical eye sweeps round my shelves in quest of two thin folios bound in crimson morocco. These contain a large number of etchings by the famous Spanish painter Don Francisco Goya y Lucientes, and bear the title of Los Desastres de la Gruerra — the Disasters of War. The etchings, some of which are thinly aqua-tinted, are twenty times more horrible than Callot's well- known Miseries of War," which are shocking enough in many of their details, but which are drawn on so minute a scale that it is often only by the aid of a strong magnifying glass that you can discern the barbarities which Man is inflict- ing on Man. In Goya's dreadful book the com- positions are large and broad in execution ; and PIG TUBES THAT HAUNT ME. 165 the dismal dramas which are being enacted strike you at once and chill you to the marrow. The artist has depicted the excesses committed by the French garrison of Madrid, after the unsuc- cessful rising of the populace on the memorable ^^Dos de Mayo/' 1808. Women, with black mantillas over their white skirts, are charging and firing cannon ; maddened mothers are stabbing ferocious French soldiers, with whom shrieking Spanish girls are struggling. Then come scores of pictures exhibiting the fero- cious vengeance of the French. Men and women are being shot, impaled, burnt to death, garrotted, and chopped in pieces, and their mangled remains are being shot out of tumbrels into pits. I have a very large collection of Groyas etchings — the ''Caprices," the ''Prisoners," the " Bull-fightings," the " Proverbs," and others ; and I remember showing them, once, to Mr. Jan Van Beers. He admired — as who does not admire ? — the extraordinary vigour and dramatic expression of the great Spaniard; but when he came to the "Disasters of War" he found it for a time impossible to tear himself away from those terrible volumes, which exercised over him. 166 THINGS AND PEOPLE, as they do over me, a weird and fearsome fasci- nation. There is another Groya, too, an oil- painting, in the Eoyal Grallery at Brussels. It represents what may be termed the operating theatre " of the Inquisition at Madrid, which, towards the end of the eighteenth century, had become a kind of Bridewell for the imprisonment and punishment, not only of suspected heretics, but also of quacks and mountebanks, fortune- tellers, and women of evil life. The Brussels picture, glowing as it does with light and colour, is a simply hideous performance. Victims of both sexes are being racked, fettered, scourged, branded, picketted, and maltreated in almost every possible form, and the colour of the whole work is as rich as that of a Bubens or a Eeynolds. When I was young I used to be haunted by the paintings, and the mezzotint engravings therefrom, of a once amazingly favourite, but now, I should say, mainly forgotten artist, John Martin, His pictures were vast architectural machines," in which he imitated, not with very great success, the scheme of Bembrandt in juxtapositions of light and shadow. His figures PICTURES THAT HAUNT ME. 167 were misty and faulty in drawing and model- ling ; yet there was something about the man that imposed on you and made you, for a time, bow to him in deference and almost fear. The last of his oil paintings, the Eve of the Deluge," I think I saw at the old British In- stitution in 1841. It was a huge canvas, so highly varnished as to rival the sheen of the painted panel of a state carriage. Of his earlier works, ''Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still,'^ " Belshazzar's Feast," the " Fall of Baby- lon," I can only remember the transcripts in mezzotint ; but they haunted me for many a year, and I used to go home and strive to produce Martinesque effects by smoking jet- black a sheet of cardboard over a candle, and then dashing in violent effects of light with a penknife. There was a special printseller's shop in Wardour Street — a shop long since vanished — where there were always plenty of John Martin's alarming mezzotints on view. That shop I also recall, from the fact that I once saw in the window a large etching illustrating Cow- per's " John Gilpin," for which splendid piece of needle work the artist, Hablot Knight Browne, 168 THIXGS AXn PEOPLE. had received tlie prize of a medal, either of silver or o'old, from the Eoval Societv of Arts. I cannot remember to have looked on this par- ticular etching at any time or at any place since. As for the mezzotints after Martin, they must- be entombed, somewhere or another, in dim port- folios, for I scarcely ever see them exposed to the public gaze. One morning, however, a few^ years since, walking doAvn the Western Eoad, Brighton, I came across a temporary exhibition of Martins original oil paintings. They had fallen into a desperately dingy and grubby con- dition ; but the proprietor of the show informed me that these paintings had made the round of the world, and had been exhibited daring a lono' course of vears in ever so manv countries. There are a few Turners which come up to me of a sudden, and they are always welcome ; although they are productions belonging to the epoch which most critics, with the exception perhaps of Mr. Euskin, take to be the period of the mighty painter's decadence. I can re- member very well, on the walls of the Eoyal Academy Exhibition at the Xational Gallery, not at Burlington House, the famous picture PIGTUBES THAT HAUNT ME. 169 of the express train dashing along a viaduct on the Grreat Western Eailway, Eain, Steam, and Speed/' I think ifc was called. Then there was ''Jessica at the Window," which, from the abundance of bright yellow in the background, was known to irreverent observers as the Mad Woman and the Mustard Pot." The "Slave Ship," the Old Teimraire,'' and Venice — Groing to the Ball," and Returning from the Ball " — belonged, if I mistake not, to this period ; and while watching effects of colour in sea and sky in distant lands, on the shores of the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean, in the Red Sea, in Spain and Italy, Turner's later incoherent but gorgeous colour-dreams have often flitted across my mental field of vision. Perhaps, out of the many thousands of works of art which from first to last I must have looked upon at home and abroad, there are, in addition to those which I have already set down, no pictures that so persistently haunt me as two marvellous paintings executed between forty and fifty years ago. They were works in dis- temper — one painted by Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., for Macready, when he was lessee of Drury Lane 170 TRING8 AND PEOPLE, Theatre, and the other executed by William Beverly at the Princess's about 1846-7. The first was the seashore scene in Jets and Galatea, the second a scene in Edward Loder's opera of The Night Dancers, an exquisitely beautiful view of a lake with distant mountains, and in the foreground a palm. 171 CHAPTEE XVII. TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED. Metamorphosed Taverns — Greorge IV. and his Works — The Making of Regent Street — Great Swallow Street — Development of Club Life— The Old White Hart, Bishopsgate Street— The Old Elephant, Fenchurch Street, and William Hogarth — The Old Dog, Holywell Street — Changing Fashions in Drinks — Business and Liquor Fifty Years Ago — The Rainbow, in Fleet Street — The Cock — Peele's Coffee House. It is rather a difficult matter, and a delicate one to boot, to write about taverns which have vanished ; since, within the last five-and-twenty years or so, an almost incomplete structural metamorphosis has taken place of many old- fashioned hotels and taverns which I remember in my youth. Still have we Long's and Limmer's ; but they are not the Long's and Limmer's of my nonage. Scores upon scores of houses for the sale of excisable liquors have been partially or wholly reconstructed ; they have been made, of course, brighter and handsomer, and offer much more luxurious accommodation to the public than under their old conditions they 172 THINGS AND PEOPLE. used to do ; yet, they wholly lack the pic- turesque associations which they presented to me when some three-and-forty years ago, in the columns of Household Words, I wrote a series of papers on Phases of Public Life." The names of the original signs of the old taverns, at a few of which I propose to glance, are of course recited in the leases ; but in a multitude of instances the frequenters of the transformed places of entertainment know nor care little whether the houses which they patronise are the Magpie and Stump, the Coach and Horses, the Crown, the Wrekin, the Angel and Sun, or the Monster. There are, it is true, certain tavern signs the names of which have become, in connection with the vehicular traffic of the metropolis, per- manently graven on the memory of that very large section of the public who travel by omni- bus. Thus, there may be many thousands of people who have heard, and are well aware of, the locality of that same Monster at Pimlico, the Elephant and Castle, the Swiss Cottage, the Eyre Arms, the Sol's Arms, the Angel at Islington, the Mother Redcap, and the Hero of Waterloo ; but who would never dream TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED. 173 of entering those hostelries ; and possibly a large proportion of these omnibus travellers are teetotallers. I suppose that the process of the disappearance of the oldest of the London taverns began on an extended scale during the architectural supremacy of Nash, whose Royal master was commendabl}^ desirous of beautifying the metropolis of his dominions. William Hone, in the scurrilous Political Catec/iism, for publishing which he was tried before Lord Ellenborough and acquitted, paid an oblique compliment to the King whom he libelled by dubbing him George, Maker of New Streets." One of the new streets which we owe to the taste and liberality of the much- maligned Fourth George was, as I have men- tioned before, Eegent Street ; and that hand- some thoroughfare — which, were the houses only twenty feet higher, would be one of the noblest in Europe — was partially formed by the demoli- tion of a long, shabby, dirty thoroughfare called Great Swallow Street, which abounded in old taverns and livery stables, the last of which enjoyed the equivocal celebrity of being much affected by highwaymen, for the putting up of 174 THINGS AND PEOPLE. their steeds. Claude Duval is — I should say apociyphally — reputed to have been one of the distinguished patrons of the Grreat Swallow Street stables. More old taverns had to be taken down to render practicable the audacious architec- tural curve of the Quadrant ; and yet more taverns vanished to make way for the ap- proach from the eastern corner of Piccadilly to Carlton House. Another cause of the dis- appearance of antique metropolitan taverns was the extraordinary development of clubs during the reigns of George IV. and William IV. The clubs of Eastern and Central London, during the eighteenth century, were more or less intellectual pot-houses ; and the West-End clubs were mainly gaming-houses, which, with the ex- ception of Brooks's and White's, had scant architectural pretensions ; but very soon after the formation of Eegent Street palatial clubs began to spring up with surprising rapidity in the parish of St. James. The innovation w^as hotly resented by many Conservatives in con- vivialism, whose idea of a club w^as that it should merely be a place for eating, drinking, TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED. 175 and conversation, and not necessarily occupying premises of its own. I have before me a book called " The Clubs of London/' published in 1828, in which no less than one hundred and thirty-two pages out of three hundred and thirty are devoted to a history of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks " — the old Beefsteak Club — then held in a room in the Lyceum Theatre. The writer has also some very genial words to say touching a number of clubs held at taverns and coffee- houses ; but in his preface he contemptuously repudiates the name of club, as applied to several modern subscription houses which, by a colloquial usurpation, are called clubs. They are merely substitutes for the coffee-houses which they have superseded. It was not the love of pleasant companionship that gave them birth ; but a thrifty speculation that purveys at the cheapest rate for sensual satisfaction." In the following year (1829) there was taken down the Old White Hart tavern, in Bishopsgate Street, an exceedingly quaint struc- ture, the front to which bore the date 1480. It was three-storeyed, with an overhanging 176 THIXGS AND PEOPLE. upper floor, and had been noted by Stow as a fair inn for receipt of travellers next nnto the parish church of St. Buttolph." Obviously I never saw this remarkably ancient tavern, for the sufficing reason that I was only a year old when it vanished ; but I have a distinct recollection of having been acquainted in my childhood with the outsides of mxany taverns quite as picturesque as the Old White Hart. I remember the slanting roof of the Thatched House tavern, standing a good way back, in St. James's Street. I have slept at the old Angel, in the Strand, where now is Danes' Inn. I remember the Crown and Anchor, and the London Tavern. I have visited friends staying at the Clarendon in Bond Street — a tomb of generations of aristo- cratic Capulets. I have a picture of the Old White Hart in an interleaved copy of a book called Tavern Anecdotes, by One of the Old School," published, I should say, some time in the 'thirties, in which I find an en- graving of the Old Elephant tavern in Pen- church Street. It was kept by M. Hibbert," and it vended, in addition to wines and spirits, TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED, 177 " Henry Meux and Co/s Entire/' and it pro- claimed itself a ''House of Call for Errand Carts/' What were errand carts ? The Old Elephant was a three-storeyed brick house, with stone dressings to the windows, and to all appear- ance was of seventeenth-century construction. When did it disappear? I should like to know ; because, in a newspaper cutting attached to the engraving, it is stated that the Old Elephant was worthy of the attention of all lovers of painting, since in it, previous to its celebrity, lodged William Hogarth. On the wall of the tap-room were four paintings by Hogarth, one representing the Hudson's Bay Company's porters ; another the first idea for the Modern Midnight Conversation," and another of '' Harlequin and Pierrot." In a room on the first floor was a picture of Harlow Bush Fair — whatever Harlow Bush Fair may have been. If the great English painter, en- graver, and philosopher did really lodge at the Old Elephant, it was probably at the period when he was engraving plates for a printseller in Cornhill. Of another very ancient tavern I have something more specific to say. I mean the 7n 178 THINGS AND FEOPLE. Old Dog, in Holywell Street ; a house which I remember very well, inasmuch as I resided there some months about three-and-forty years since. The hostelry has entirely disappeared ; the licence, I suppose, has long since lapsed ; and on the site of the old house have been erected two or three altogether modern shops. Early in the Restoration there was a tavern by the sign of The Dog, which is frequently mentioned in Pepys' Diary." The house was much fre- quented by the Clerks of the Exchequer ; and on one occasion Mr. Pepys gave these estimable civil servants a dinner at The Dog. Lord Bray- broke, in his first edition of the ''Diary," says in a note that the Dog tavern still existed in Holywell Street ; but in subsequent editions this statement was corrected, and it was stated that Pepys' Dog must have been in Westminster ; although a house in Holywell Street still bore the same designation. The edition I now speak of bears the date 1890 ; but at least fifteen years, if not more, I should say, have elapsed since the demolition of the Old Dog in Holywell Street. It must have faded out of existence while I was absent on some mission abroad. In any case. TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED. 179 a good deal of mystery has, so far as metropolitan antiquaries are concerned, surrounded the begin- ning and the ending of this particular tavern. Allan and Peter Cunningham, and other eminent writers have had nothing to say about the Old Dog, although it was situated in a street of which Strype makes mention in his edition of Stow; while the late Mr. Timbs incidentally alludes to it when he remarks that the Holy Wei], which gave its name to the narrow little street, was under the Old Dog tavern. This," writes Mr. Walford, in " Old and New London," is clearly a mistake." As it happens, it has been my lot to look down a well, not under, but behind the Old Dog. About 1851 the house passed into the possession of the late Mr. Nicholas Dormer, the landlord of a tavern in the Strand close by, called " Old Betty's Chop House." To his ultimate misfortune, he made considerable structural alterations in the old premises, and, imbued with the persuasion that the choked-up well at the back was the identical Holy one, he spent nearly £200 in excavating the well, which was filled nearly to the top with miscellaneous rubbish. 7)1 2 180 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Day after day I used to pay him a visit, to see how the excavations were progressing. Our finds " were scarcely remunerative : consisting, as they mainly did, of huge quantities of smashed crockery, brickbats, old pots and kettles, and broken bottles. One or two interesting articles did turn up. There were numerous tobacco- pipes of the ''churchwarden" pattern, and bearing the date of 1742, and a scrap of paper seemingly torn out of a memorandum book, and containing in faded ink the words, " Dr. Groldsmith, 13s. lOd." Was this an unpaid score of Goldie's ? There were the fragments of a shattered punch bowl, with a William and Mary guinea encrusted in a part of the base. Probably this china bowl had been broken in some mid- night frolic and flung wantonly down the well ; but when all these dehris had been taken out we did not come on any water. The spring was as dry as though it had been sunk in the Valley of Dry Bones. But I am anticipating a little. I knew the Old Dog some years before I made the acquaint- ance of Mr. Dormer. In 1847 I had an office at the western corner of Holywell Street, where I TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED, 181 edited, illustrated, published, and owned a little halfpenny weekly publication. The original proprietor had been a Mr. Frederick Marriott, who, on leaving England for California, where at San Francisco he founded the yet flourishing jSan Francisco News Letter, liberally assigned to me the copyright and goodwill of the little pub- lication in question. After a while I took a partner. Our venture was not a highly pros- perous one : the journal never obtaining more than a modest circulation. We could have lived very well on the advertisements, but the Inland Ee venue ate us up in duties. All we wanted was a couple of thousand pounds or so to push the undertaking. One afternoon we received a visit from an American gentleman who had something to do, if I remember aright, with a pill, or a plaster, or a baby's soothing syrup, or something of that kind. He was one of our best advertisers, and his object in calling on us was to discuss the expediency of purchasing a third share in our journal. Of course, we named two thousand pounds as the minimum price ; yet I scarcely think the property was worth quite so much as that. 182 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Business, however, is business ; and in the days of which I speak very few business trans- actions could be begun or terminated without the agency of what was conventionally known as a pint of wine." Frequently the pint became a quart, and not unfrequently brandy- and-water hot was considered as a convertible beverage for the juice of the grape. When I speak of brandy -and- water I may add that it was almost invariably brown brandy — precisely that brown brandy which my mother used to mingle with her Christmas plum -puddings, and which is understood by the Americans when they order ''soda and dark bottom." To drink pale brandy, or cognac, was looked upon as an affecta- tion ; and not one Englishman out of a hundred ever touched whisky, either the Irish or the Scotch variety. There are changing fashions in drinks as well as in most other mundane things. For forty years I had been reading about the extensive consumption of brandy pawnee " in India; but when at last I did get to Calcutta, I found that brandy pawnee had be- come almost entirely a thing of the past, and TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED. 183 that the universal beverage among Anglo-Indians who drank anything stronger than water was much-diluted whisky. It was, however, a legiti- mate pint of wine that the American gentleman, my partner, and myself regaled ourselves with in the coffee-room of the Old Dog ; for the tavern happened to be celebrated for its old port. None of your light old ports with no to- morrow " in them ; but a sound, stiff, beeswinged old crusted vintage, that seemed to grow stronger as it grew older. Our negotiations with the American gentleman did not, I am sorry to say, go beyond emptying, say, a couple of bottles of port and nibbling a few biscuits. I wish that he had nibbled at our offer as well ; but he omitted to do so. The tavern where we dis- cussed business and wine was a typical example of the houses of entertainment which have vanished from our midst. It was, like the old White Hart in Bishopsgate Street, a beetle- browed, three-storeyed structure, with three bays of windows on the first and second floor, and an overhanging superstructure. You entered the place by a rather steep flight of steps ; and if you were privileged to enjoy the acquaintance of 184 THINGS AND PEOPLE. tlie landlady of the establislimenfc, Mr. Dormer's predecessor, yon might at once walk into her extremely comfortable, althongh somewhat dark, bar parlour. There she used to sit in a big arm- chair, surrounded by heavy old furniture and dingy old prints in ponderous frames, chatting with her gossips, and generally beaming around - in a manner most cheerful to behold. The bar was a mere hutch or counter, cut in the wall, where a pretty barmaid attended to the needs of casual customers. These were, however, comparatively few and far between. Casual drinkers preferred Old Betty's Chop House in the Strand hard by, or some other of the " pubs " which abounded in the neighbour- hood. The Old Dog did not bark furiously or even growl at people who wanted a glass of beer or spirits ; but it did not wag its ancient tail at such patrons. A right cordial welcome, however, it extended to parties who desired ''a pint of wine," and who were sedu- lously, although somewhat patronisingly, served by a very stout, elderly waiter, who disdained to bear a napkin on his arm, but who constantly waved a very large red-and-yellow bandana silk TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED. 185 handkerchief. There was a dining-room and a coffee-room on the other side of the passage, in which was the bar ; and there was another little apartment, not much bigger than a state-room on board an Atlantic steamship, which exiguous apartment was known as the smoke-room. As a matter of fact, smoking was allowed in the coffee-room after seven o'clock, by which hour the dinners had almost invariably come to an end ; while about five in the afternoon the land- lady had in her bar parlour quite a little levee of substantial tradesmen and professional meu in the neighbourhood, who came to gossip with her and each other and sip brown brandy and water. Let there be no mistake about it : business between forty and fifty years ago was, to a very great extent, supported on pillars of excisable liquors. It would amaze youthful and middle- aged moderate drinkers, could they form an adequate idea of the amount of drinking which went on among well-to-do and decorous business men when I was a lad — drinking not by any means confined to the night season, but pro- gressing very steadily throughout the day. 186 THINGS AND FEOPLE. In one of Defoe's dialogue-stories, two re- spectable tradesmen meet, one of whom has just had a violent quarrel with his son. His friend suggests that they should adjourn to an adjacent tavern and discuss the whole question of parental authority over a pint of wine," and they thus did in fiction in 1693 that which we used to do at the Old Dog in 1847. The house was largely supported in its hotel capacity by steady-going old commercial travellers : a race who, I suppose, have undergone the transformation which has taken place in almost every grade and profes- sion. Many of these commercial ''gen.ts" had patronised the Dog for twenty or thirty years, and even longer ; and they were sorrowfully scandalised when Mr. Dormer, having made a good deal of money at Old Betty's Chop House, purchased the lease of the Old Dog ; and, while still keeping a number of bedrooms, converted the lower part of the house into a modern restau- rant, with a capacious bar which was nothing more nor less than a highlj^-decorated pub." For a while he prospered ; but his enterprise was in the end disastrous, and the Dog, at last, disappeared for ever. I should much like. TAVERNS THAT HAVE VANISHED. 187 nevertheless, to know what has become of the well out of which we extracted the broken shards of crockery and the eighteenth-century tobacco pipes. Transformation as well as total disappear- ance has been the lot of many of the old taverns of my time. I can remember the Old Hum mums in Co vent Garden, and the old Eainbow in Fleet Street, near the Inner Temple gate. The Rainbow was formerly known as Nando's Coffee House, and in the time of Charles 11. was kept by one James a Barbe, who was presented by the Inquest — or recommended for prosecution — by the Ward of St. Dunstan-in-the- West for making and selling a sort of liquor called coffee, to the great nuisance and prejudice of the neighbourhood." Of the Old Cock, like- wise in Fleet Street, it would be obviously impertinent to say anything after Will Water- proof's Lyrical Monologue," but I may apolo- getically mention, as a proof of the rigid conservatism of the Cock, that a very old friend of mine, a well-known man of letters, taking his chop once at the Cock and following it with a salad, in the dressing of which he considered 188 THINGS AND PEOPLE. liimself an adept, asked for a hard-boiled egg. The head waiter looked at him earnestly, and politely but authoritatively replied, Hif Prince Halbert wos to come here, sir, he couldn't 'ave a hegg." Peele's Coffee House, now a handsome and quite modern house of entertainment, was in my youth an old tavern, the much- favoured resort of countrj^ squires, who, when they came up to town, found the beefsteaks at Peele's as toothsome as those on which they feasted, when they visited the West End, at the Blue Posts in Cork Street, Burlington Gardens. In 1885, happening to be at Adelaide, South Australia, I was favoured with the ac- quaintance of the chief of the mounted police, who was a very old Londoner, and who asked me if regular files of all the town and country newspapers were still kept at Peele's Coffee House, for the amusement or business reference of visitors who were desirous of learning the news of their particular county or town, or of knowing what property was to be disposed of in or out of London. By referring to these files, he added, any person who had sent an T AVE ENS THAT HAVE VANISHED. 189 advertisement to a paper might know if it had appeared at the time ordered. There was a diverting and instructive suggestiveness in this inquiry of those literally dear " old days of journalism when the price of a daily newspaper was sevenpence, the Government appropriating no less than fourpence for the stamp. The penny stamp, which has also vanished, was, com- paratively speaking, a modern impost. 190 C EE AFTER XVIII. DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. French and English School Diet Compared — Eating Fat by Deputy — Joe's " Chophouse in Finch Lane — Market before "Meat" — "A devilish good Dinner for Threepence Halfpenny" — The "Thirteen Cantons" — Beef a la mode — A Mysterious Sauce — A Famous Boiled Beef House in the Old Bailey — The Waitress and the Barrister — A Disestablished Feast — Respond- ing for the Visitors — The Sublime Society of Steaks — An Unspoken Speech — A Dinner at Clifford's Inn — An American Maxim. It stands to reason that, in the course of more than fifty years' dining out, one must have en- countered a rather large number of interesting and, more or less, memorable repasts. It has been my lot to dine with all sorts and conditions of people, in almost every part of the world ; and I am now jotting down, as chronologically as I am able to do, a few of the dinners of which I have partaken, together with some brief notices of the people I have met at more or less well- furnished tables. Naturally, when we begin to take a retro- spective view of bygone meals, the mind reverts DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. 191 to scholastic experiences in the matter of feeding ; and I think I can serve some useful purpose if I tell my readers how schoolboys were fed in France and in England half a century since. As I have said before, I was at a public school in Paris for about two years. It was a day school ; so every morning about nine o'clock, I made one of a band of about forty boys who, under the charge of a pion, a kind of sub-usher, were marched down to college from the boarding house, or pension, in the Eue de Courcelles. At noon we were marched back again to break- fast ; at two we returned to college, and at five o'clock we made our final return to the Rue de Courcelles. You will excuse my particularising these hours, since I wish to show the radical difference which then existed between the man- ner of refecting boys in Paris and in London. We rose at six in the morning in summer, and at seven in winter, our toilet being of the very roughest and rudest description. Then we assem- bled in the refectory, where every boy found, at his accustomed place at the board, an earthenware pipkin, holding at least a pint and a quarter of scalding hot milk, by the side of which was a 192 THINGS AND PEOPLE. large hunch of excellent bread. Then a man- servant came round with a huge tin coffee-pot, and poured about a gill of the concoction of the odoriferous product of Mocha — or elsewhere — into each boy's pipkin. This was our cafe au lait, or first breakfast. The elder boys, if they were in funds, were allowed to purchase a pat of butter ; but, in the majority of cases, we were quite satisfied with bread, milk, and coffee. In summer time there was a slight diversion from the monotony of the cafe au lait. Two days a week we were marched to an ecole de natatiofi, or swimming bath, on the banks of the Seine. After our bath we had the choice either of bread, milk, and coffee at the buffet attached to the baths, or of a little crusty loaf of brown bread, a tiny garlic sausage, a piece of Grruyere or Brie, and a cup of cold milk ; and as we were usually sharp set, after a walk of a couple of miles and an hour's exercise at swimming, we were glad to avail ourselves of the brown bread, sausage, cheese, and cup of milk alternative. The noon breakfast consisted of one dish of meat, for which on Friday was substituted either fish, eggs, or haricot beans, a dish of vegetables, DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED, 193 and some fruit. Apples and pears in the winter, grapes in the autumn, and currants or goose- berries and melons in summer. For dinner, at five o'clock, there was the inevitable j}ot-aH-feii, or beef broth, with vegetables ; after this came the bouilli, or beef, which had been slowly simmered, for I know not how many hours, to make the soup. It was not quite boiled to rags, as our own gravy beef generally and idiotically is, but it was cer- tainly flavourless enough ; and this trifling draw- back was compensated for by a very relishing and savoury brown sauce being served with the houilli. After this we had, according to the season, either some fowl or some turkey ; to this succeeded a dish of vegetables, and either a sweet or a large plateful of liquid cream cheese ; then dessert as at breakfast, and nothing more till half-past seven on the following morning. I should add that, both at luncheon and at dinner, each boy had the fourth part of a bottle of vin ordinaire, which he was expected to dilute with at least half its volume of water. Of course, we used to say that the wine had been preliminarily diluted ere it came to table, and its current name among us n 194 THIXGS AXI) PEOPLE. was ea^^ rovqie. Three times a week also a tlioroughl}^ good salad, dressed with excellent oil and unimpeachable white-wine vinegar, w^as served at dinner. Of course we grumbled at our fare. The salad, it was quite groundlessly asserted, was full of worms : the beef was of in- ferior quality : the poultry was tough and skinny;' and the fish and eg^i's on fast days were stale. I do not suppose that any of these allegations had the slightest foundation in fact ; but when has there been a period in the history of mankind, when schoolboys — and for the matter of that schoolgirls also — have not grumbled at the food provided for them r Coming to England to a Pestalozzian academy at Turnliam Green, for the purpose of learning the English language, which I had pretty well forgotten during ni}^ sojourn in France. I became acquainted with quite another kind of dietary. Breakfast was at eight, and the repast consisted of exceedingly weak and washy tea, and washier coffee on alternate days, with two thick slices of stale bread ver}' thinly veneered with butter. If a boy still felt hungry when he had consumed these meagre commons DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. 195 he was allowed to have an extra slice of bread and butter, if he asked for it in the German language. I have always preserved a lively antipathy for the Teutonic speech, and I fancy sometimes that my dislike for the tongue of Hermann springs in some measure from the frequency with which I used to break down in asking for more bread and butter in German. The JFoIle?i Sie so giitig sein ? used to come out very trippingly, but I usually broke down over the accusative of stiick ; and so lost the much- coveted slice. Dinner came at one p.m. There was not much to be said against the meat, save that, to our thinking, there was not enough of it. It was hot one day and cold the next, and was as a rule uncomfortably abounding in fat. I had no experience of fat meat in France ; and the fat, or rather suet, attached to the meagre slices of cold meat at the Pestalozzian academy, aroused in me feelings of absolute loathing. But it was a law of the Medes and Persians at that Pestalozzian place of education that no fat was to remain on any boy's plate ; whether the un- happy youth could eat fat or not was a matter n 2 19G THINGS AND PEOPLE. of indifference to the autliorities ; but the dread- ful stuff had to vanish. I think that I paid a boy twopence a week to eat my fat. He sat just four boys below me ; and the abhorrent adipose lumps were passed to him in a pocket handkerchief. I believe he ate that fat. He was a tallish boy, with a pasty face. The onl}^ vegetables we had with our meat were potatoes one day, and boiled cabbage the next. There was always a pudding, either baked or boiled; suet pudding with currants, and baked rice or bread and butter predominating. We never had any fish ; we never tasted veal, or pork, or poultry ; but, on breaking-up day of the Midsummer and Christmas holidays, every boy had a boiled egg. For tea, which was at five o'clock, there was the tea itself, accompanied by two more slices of thick bread, veneered with butter — an extra slice was not attainable by ask- ing for it in German ; but on most evenings in the week the bread and butter was supplemented by a slice of plum cake. It was the laudable rule of the Pestalozzian academy that, when a boy's friends sent him a cake, he should at once give it up to the housekeeper, who cut it into niNNEES DEPARTED AND DISGUSSED. 197 slices and sent it up to table at tea time, where it was impartially distributed among the young gentlemen, and the boy to whom the cake had been sent was privileged to ask two of his friends to partake of an extra slice. Boys as a rule are not bad fellows. We had a considerable contingent of foreign boys among us, to whom cakes were seldom, if ever, sent ; and I never knew an instauce of a cakeless boy being jeered at for his destitution in this regard : nay, he would often be the favoured recipient of the extra slice which I have mentioned. On Sundays we had for dinner a dish which, I dare say, was wholesome enough, but which it was the fashion to abuse and vilify. It was a meat pie, with a very substantial crust, and, of course, following some immemorial schoolboy tradition, we called it Eesurrection Pie, and declared that all the scraps of the week's dinners had been served up in this objectionable pasty. I frankly own that the indictments which we were con- tinually briuging against our food were almost devoid of foundation ; but, at the same time, I am bound to asseverate that we did not have. 198 THINGS AND PEOPLE. hj a long way, enough to eat. Such, at kast, was my practical ^ conviction, when I compared our attenuated rations with the abundant fare of my pension in the Eue de Courcelles, Paris. I was never a greedy boy; but in youth I had a hearty appetite, and I confess, without shame, that three-fourths of the pocket-money allowed me during my sojourn at an English school were spent in buying eatables — not the sweet-stuff" that boys are usually fond of squandering their pence upon; but downright solid food, sausage rolls or meat pies, or sandwiches, and so forth. Let it be understood, that neither of the schools of which I am speaking was of the Dotheboys Hall order. Both were expensive establish- ments, and in both the education imparted to us may fairly be described as splendid ; at least, in France I had plenty of Latin and Greek, prac- tical geometry — but no Euclid— drawing, model- ling, and delles lettres ; while, at my English school, I had to learn the hated Grerman; and, in addition to the usual branches of a polite English education, we learned Italia;n, a little Spanish, and a great deal of music, both vocal and instrumental. The head master was a most DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. 199 remarkable person. He was nominally a mem- ber of the Churcli of England, and we were carefully despatched every Sunday morning to Chiswick Parish Church ; but, in the afternoon and evening, he would deliver to us what seemed to the majority of his hearers utterly incompre- hensible theological harangues and disquisitions on the ''spiritual signification" of Scripture. Unless I am mistaken, his religious sympathies were, to a considerable extent, in harmony with the nebulous doctrines of Emmanuel Sweden- borg. When I come to review the dinners of my adolescence — those, I mean, which I enjoyed after I had left a comfortable home to earn my own living — I am confronted by a few difficulties, not wholly insurmountable, but still not at all easy of solution. For example, it is quite impossible to notice these repasts in anything like chrono- logical order. The dinners were not regularly con- tinuous : they were only occasionally recurrent, and there were wide gaps or intervals between them, during which, I am inclined to suspect, the dinners must have been very few in number, if, indeed, they existed at all. Now, a clerk 200 THINGS AND PEOPLE. in a Government ofRce, if he have a tolerable memory, can bear in mind the whereabouts of all the restaurants or eating-houses which he has patronised since his first induction into the Civil Service. I am not able to keep anything of the nature of an exact record of the meals which I discussed between my twentieth and my thirtieth years. They varied in quantity and in quality ; still, assuming that at the least fortunate period I had a regular dinner, say, a hundred and fifty days in each year, I must have resorted to a very large number of dining-rooms. My friend Mr. Edmund Yates knows much more about the City- chop house, which flourished Avhile he was in the Post Office, than I do. I can only recall with distinctness one chop house east of St. Paul's. It was somewhere near the Mansion House end of Cornhill, if I remember aright, and was one of the regular orthodox Old London luncheon houses. Men worth their hundred thousand pounds, bankers and merchants and stock-brokers, at the time of the railway mania, were not ashamed to lunch at this establishment, under the follow- ing primitive and unostentatious circumstances. DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED, 201 The first thing your hundred thousand pound man did was to proceed to Bannister's, the butcher, somewhere near Threadneedle Street, and purchase his chop or steak, which was handed to him neatly wrapped up in a fresh cabbage -leaf ; then, if he preferred biscuit to bread, he would repair to the shop of a baker named Moxhay, a shrewd Scotchman, who made, I think, a very large fortune, and built a huge edifice called the Hall of Commerce, which has long since been converted into a bank or insur- ance office, or something of that kind. With their raw meat wrapped up in a cabbage-leaf in one hand, and their bag of biscuits in the other, the City Croesuses would placidly enter their favourite chop house, where a bald-headed waiter would take charge of the viands, deliver them to the cook, and in due time bring them piping hot to the guests. Potatoes were always in readi- ness, together with the proper condiments and good store of Stilton and Cheddar cheese. Still, looking at the circumstance that the majority of the customers brought their own meat with them, you might ask where the chop house keeper's profits came in. The remunerative 202 THINGS AND PEOPLE. part of the business was the very large con- sumption of brown stout, sound sherry and Madeira, and old port, both dry and fruity. In those remote times gentlemen saw nothing derogatory in comfortably cracking a bottle of port at a chop house, after disposing with equal cheerfulness of a quart of stout, and then going back to business. There were giants in the land in those days. I have an indistinct idea also that, at one period of my youth, I was a pretty constant customer at a particular eating-house on Holborn Hill, in the window of which restaurant there was a placard bearing an inscription, A devilish good dinner for threepence halfpenny/' The devilish good dinner was simply stewed leg of beef and, with a liberal allowance of bread, was really a most satisfjdng meal. Much more epicurean, however, was the fare obtainable at the different establishments for the sale of what was called alamode beef, which, with the excep- tion of its bovine foundation, presented no culin- ary resemblance to that hoeuf a la mode which is one of the standing dishes of the Frencli cuisine hourgeoise, and can be obtained to perfection at DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED, 203 the present day at a restaurant in one of the streets at the rear of the Palais Eoyal. Forty, thirty, and even twenty years ago, alamode beef shops were scattered pretty liberally over central London, but the establishment with which I was most familiar was a house with the sign of the Thhteen Cantons," in Blackmore Street, Drury Lane. It was kept by a person by the name, I think, of Jacquet. If you asked for a fourpenny plate of alamode, it was brought to you in a pewter plate ; and that plate, I warrant you, stood very little in need of cleaning after the beef had been despatched. The customers' knives and spoons made the pewter glisten as though it were silver. For sixpence you were served with a somewhat larger portion of alamode on an earthen- ware plate. Why it was called alamode puzzled me ; but it was a distinctly characteristic dish, deriving its peculiarity from the remarkably luscious and tasty sauce, or rather soup, with which it was accompanied. The composition of this thick rich sauce perplexed many culinary experts. Soyer, who was very fond of alamode beef, and often used to send for a quart of it in a jug for the refection of himself and friends at 204 THINGS AXD PEOPLE. supper, frankly acknowledged that he did not know what were the ino^redients of the sauce. The late Mr. Christopher Pond, of the firm of Spiers and Pond, was of opinion that the thick- ening was made with arrowroot ; but, happening some twenty years ago to have made sportive mention in some periodical or another of the by- gone alamode beef at the Thirteen Cantons," the former proprietor of the establishment wrote me a very courteous letter and cleared up the mystery. He had retired from business, he told me, having realised a modest competence, and had no longer any reason to keep the recipe for the thickening a secret. It was simplj^, he said, made from a particular mushroom, which he called ''morella,'' and which I infer was the Jlorchella escidenta described in botanical works. These mushrooms were gathered in the fields round about the metropolis, dried, reduced to powder, and then used to thicken the sauce and enhance the flavour of alamode beef. There may be a few eating-houses which are still exclusively devoted to the preparation of this speciality ; but I am inclined to fear that alamode beef houses in London have grown as rare as the pewter plates DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. 205 on which the fourpenny portions were served in the bygones.^ Among the dinners departed and discussed during adolescence and maturity, I should be erring gravely if I did not allude to two most remarkable places of entertainment which formerly adorned the Old Bailey. The first was Williams's Boiled Beef House, which stood on the right hand side of the thoroughfare just named, as you ascend the once repulsive, but now handsome, Ludgate Hill. Williams's was an establishment wholly devoid of architectural pretensions; and the ceilings of the dining-room were, if I mistake not, somewhat low. The floor — in my time, at least — was sanded ,• the knives were devoid of balanced handles, and the forks were of steel and had only three prongs. You see that this memorable eating- house dated from days long before Elkington, and even before the era when a substitute for * Since these remarks were first published I have received several letters telling' me that alamode beef can still be obtained at numerous restaurants in the metropolis. That may be, and I am glad to hear it ; yet I doubt whether there are any eating-houses left exclusively devoted to the sale of alamode and conducted on the old-fashioned " Thirteen Cantons " model — including the pewter platters. 206 THIXGS AXB PEOPLE. silver, sometimes called albata/' sometimes '•Britannia metal/' and sometimes ''Shef- field plate/' was used in middle-class eating- houses. The triumphantly predominant staple at Williams's was the boiled beef. It was renowned throughout Europe. French culinary critics declared it to be superior to their own beloved hovUli, and a formidable rival to our own rosbif.*' Williams's boiled beef needed no rich sauce to make it palatable. It stood on its own merits — calmly, loftily, serenely, and without fear of competition. The joints — if joints the mighty masses of meat could be called — weighed on an average thirty pounds each, and were taken from the silver or tongue " side of the round. "Williams's cook, a pale, portly, pensive man, who had been boiling-cook at the London Tavern, sometimes condescended to tell regular customers that he salted his beef for eio'ht or ten davs ; then cleaned off the brine, skewered the round up tight, and encircled it with a piece of wide tape to keep it well together. The meat was allowed to simmer very gently, allowing twenty minutes for DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. 207 eacli pound weight. No made " gravy, if you please, witli tliis not only British, but Homeric, dish. Only some of the liquor in which the meat had been boiled was thrown over it. It was wine of beef. Only one variant to the classic round " was permitted at Williams's. To please the eyes of more artistic guests there was a boiled beef at the Old Bailey eating-house which had been pickled with salt, sugar, and powdered saltpetre, which last gave the flesh a fine ruddy hue. With each joint were served accompaniments or ''trimmings " more elaborate than those which come with a boiled leg of mutton — that is to say, potatoes, mashed turnips, together with caper sauce. At Williams's you had potatoes of exquisite mealiness, carrots sweet and juicy, greens if you liked, boiled to a turn with just a dash of vinegar to give them life, and, to crown all, suet pudding — an almost pellucid pudding, with such liberality had the suet been introduced to modify and mollify the lumpiness of the flour and water. All these divers dainties were brought in vessels of block tin, somewhat resembling the French gamelle — that is to say, into the 208 THINGS AND FEOPLE. structure of the different dishes, which con- stituted, so to speak, a kind of metallic pillar, there entered that ''tambour" principle which was used by Philibert de Lorne in the construction of the columns in the fagade of the Tuileries. The service at Williams's was exclusively performed by waitresses ; and the unerring accuracy with which they carried the round towers of block tin, so that they should never topple over, earned for those neat-handed Pliyllises the admiration of customers, who were besides chronically pleased by the good looks and the civility of the female attendants. There was a legend current among the /labifues of the restaurant that a young barrister, just called, who had elected to seek for practice at the Old Bailey bar, once entered Williams's, and called for beef with the usuals " — the usuals " meaning the vegetables and suet pudding. The neat- handed Phyllis made her appearance in due time bearing the circular tower of metal with " tambours " of beef and accessories. She was a very good-looking waitress, and ordinarily a smiling one. She looked the youthful barrister DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. 209 in the face ; and then her comely countenance first flushed scarlet, and then assumed a hue of muffin-like pallor. Her hand shook ; the circular tower became more pendant than the leaning tower of Pisa; she screamed Wretch ! and down went the entire fabric, the beef whizzing in one direction, and the vegetables and the pudding in another. To quote Cole- ridge : — " Alas ! they had been friends in youth ; But whispering tongues can poison truth, And constancy lives in realms above, And life is thorny, and youth is vain, And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain." This calamitous rencontre must have taken place some time about 1849. I was a pretty constant customer, I should say, for some time after- wards ; but when the regretted disestablishment of Williams's took place I am unable to tell. You will remember that when ^neas and his shipwrecked companions landed on the Punic coast they felt extremely hungry, and at once proceeded to knock over three beamy stags,'' which, being duly cut up, were hurriedly boiled 0 210 THINGS AND PEOPLE. in a cauldron, the improvised meal being washed down by sundry jars of generous wine, the gift of the Trinacrian Acestes. ^Eneas's meal of seethed venison may, for the purpose which I have in hand, be likened to WilHams's Boiled Beef House, which was rarely called to furnish jars of generous wine, but often, as a grace- ful substitute, offered stimulating old ale and choice brown stout. But Virgilian students will likewise call to mind the fact that ^neas and his jovial crew were subsequently and splen- didly entertained in Queen Dido's palace. Ten fat oxen were sent to the ship, together with a hundred boars and as many lambs ; while the Trojan prince himself was banqueted on the rarest viands ; after which golden bowls with sparkling wine — possibly the first mention in poetry of champagne — went round, and through the palace cheerful cries resounded. I had my feast at Dido's Palace in the Old Bailey, long after Williams's boiled beef and ''usuals" had become a departed dinner. My Dido was the Lord Mayor of London, and the Trojan lords of the Central Criminal Court were one of her Majesty's Judges, DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. 211 the Eecorder, the Common Serjeant, the Sheriffs, and a sprinkling of the members o£ the Old Bailey bar. The hospitable friend who was kind enough to invite me to this most characteristic dinner was Alderman Sir John Bennett ; and the year, I fancy, must have been the one in which he served the Shrieval oflB.ce. City Corporation usages die hard; and it is worth notice that so long since as 1836 the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, in the course of a diverting article, On Matters Culinary " in the Quarterly Revieio, remarked that ''the fiat had gone forth already against one class of City dinners, which was altogether peculiar of its time " ; yet it must have been more than thirty years after the appearance of this article that I found myself a guest at the well-spread board in the dining-room over the Court. Originally, I believe, these banquets con- sisted exclusively of beefsteaks; but at the dinner at which I was present there were three courses and a dessert, in the most approved style of Messrs. Ring and Brymer's cuisine. Port and sherry made a conspicuous appearance, and there was also plenty of 0 2 212 THINGS AND PEOPLE. champagne and claret — in fact, it was a civic dinner of the highest class, and only differed from the symjDosia of the Mansion House and the halls of the City Companies in the circumstance that there was one course com- posed of marrow pudding. It will be at once apparent that, although these famous puddings are practically sweet cates, made as they are of thin slices of bread, marrow, cream, eggs, citron, sugar, and pounded sweet almonds, a graceful tribute was paid to beef at the Central Court dinners by the fact that the marrow was in- variably beef marrow. Another characteristic of these departed tribunals was that the vice-chair was taken by the chaplain or Ordinary of Newgate, whose special duty it was to see that the glasses of the guests at his end of the table were kept fully charged. There was some speech-making after dinner ; the oratory being delivered sitting and not standing. I had to return thanks for the visitors, and I naturally prefaced my few words of grateful acknowledgment by remarking that I found myself dreadfully alarmed at being surrounded by so many exalted legal and civic DINNEBS DEPAUTED AND DISCUSSED. 213 functionaries ; and that, under the circumstances, perhaps the best thing I could do was to beg to be enlarged on my own recognisances, and come up for judgment, at that same dinner table, next session. Some kind of repasts are, I suppose, still held in the apartment over the Court during the periodical sittings of the Central Criminal Court; but the grandiose banquets, with the Lord Mayor in the chair and the Ordinary of Newgate in the vice, together with the marrow pudding and the sedentary speech-making after dinner, have, I fear, departed for good. Touching the inconveniences experienced by a tyro in after-dinner oratory, I may be allowed to recall a little post-prandial address which I once endeavoured, wholly unsuccess- fully, to deliver at one of the dinners of the Sublime Society of Steaks, more popularly known as the Old Beefsteak Club. This once-celebrated symposium was held in that which is now the Armoury of the Lyceum Theatre, but it is still known, I am told, as the Beefsteak Eoom. My host was a well- known sculptor, long since deceased, named Jones. The dinner, if my memory serves me 214 THINGS AND PEOPLE. correctly, took place in the summer of 1857 or 1858, and among tlie company I recollect the late Sir Charles Locock and John Lord Camp- bell, sometime Lord High Chancellor of Eng- land. I think Sir Charles Locock was in the chair ; but I am certain that that eminent medical practitioner sang a song after dinner, which ditty was emphatically declared by the members to be a thoroughly ''Beefsteak" song. Lord Brougham was expected, but he did not put in an appear- ance. The furniture of the club-room was very simple ; but the damask tablecloths were of the finest, and there Avas a handsome show of plate. One extremity of the room was in the form of a huge gridiron, through which you could see the cooks exercising their vocation in front of a roaring fire. The steaks were served in little pieces about two inches long by an inch broad, hot and hot, and there was nothing but steaks. I remember a good deal of port and a good deal of punch, but there was no champagne. Whether smoking was, or was not, permitted I am not prepared to say ; but I am inclined to think that nicotine was inhibited. The first toast was of a peculiar nature ; DINNEES DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED. 215 and the chairman, whose seat was consider- ably elevated beyond those of the other guests, assumed, at one stage of the pro- ceedings, a short velvet robe adorned with ermine, which was stated to have been worn by Garrick in the character of Eichard III. As at the Old Bailey, it fell to my lot to return thanks for the visitors, and as it happened that no less than ten days had elapsed between my reception of the invita- tion and the occurrence of the dinner itself, I found time to learn by heart what I secretly thought to be really a neat and effective little speech. There was good need for its possess- ing these qualities, since my host told me of the probable attendance at the club of two such giants of oratory as Henry Brougham and John Campbell. Well ; when the time arrived, I rose to make my speech, but I had not reached the end of the first sentence, before my voice was drowned by the unanimous and uproarious Hear, hears ! of the members. I began the speech again, only to encounter a fresh burst of cheering, and, at last, after 216 THINGS AND PEOPLE. perhaps half a dozen futile attempts to make myself heard, I abandoned the endeavour, and sat down quite baffled and discomfited. Then one of the members rose and proposed to the assemblage, which had become quite quiet and attentive in listening, that the long and eloquent speech just made by their guest should be forthwith printed, at the cost and charges of the Sublime Society, for private circulation only." I am afraid that the humours of the Sublime Society would scarcely be appre- ciated at the present day ; nor, perhaps, would the style and diction of the songs chanted after the banquet find greater favour with this fasti- dious age. The Old Beefsteak Club, indeed, has become a convivial anachronism. The dinner began at five and the festivities were over by half -past nine ; and what with the port and the punch there was some peril of your finding yourself under the portico of the Lyceum Theatre in a somewhat dishevelled condition just as the broughams of the nobility and gentry were passing up Wellington Street on their w^ay to the Eoyal Italian Opera, Covent Garden. I may say a few words touching another DINNERS DEPARTED AND DISCUSSED, 217 very curious dinner whicli I once discussed, but which I hope is not yet departed. In the remote bygones my old friend, the late Mr. Samuel Joyce, Q.C., took me to dine one evening in the hall of that extremely ancient Inn of Chancery, Clifford's Inn, of which the only knowledge that I then possessed was that the hall was the place where Sir Matthew Hale and seven other legal assessors sat after the Great Fire of 1666 to adjudicate upon the claims of landlords and tenants of houses which had perished in the flames. I think Mr. Joyce was an Ancient of the Inn. Tliere was a senior and a junior table in the picturesque, but not very spacious, hall, in which, I think, there was also preserved an old oak folding-case containing the rules of the institution, and said to date from the reign of Henry VIII. It was a capital dinner, and the port w^as rich and rare ; but the peculiarity of the banquet was in the following ceremonial : After dinner the chairman at the junior table, which was called either the Kentish Mess or the Kentish Men, took from the hands of a servitor four small rolls of bread 218 THINGS AND PEOPLE. baked together, dashed them three times on the table, and then pushed the rolls down to the further end of the board, saying at the same time, I drink to the Eules/' Subse- quently the Principal, at the senior table, rose and drank to the Kentish Men " or Mess." There was a mysterious solemnity about the whole affair which threw you into doubt as to whether you should laugh or look serious ; but, on the whole, following the American precept, ''If in doubt take a drink," the best way out of the difficulty was to devote yourself assiduously to the fine old port of this fine old Inn of Chancery. Many dinners have I discussed in the mess- room of the Guards at St. James's Palace, and I have also enjoyed the hospitality of the officer on guard at the Bank of England and in the Tower of London ; but the character of those banquets is too well known to need description here ; and, again, none of these dinners are, happily, '' departed." 219 CHAPTER XIX. COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. ''The Wretchedest of Weaklings "—Boy and G-irl Cooks— The Potato — Prices in the Past — Concerning' Omelettes— Fricour's — How to Grovern a Kitchen — Verrey's — Bertolini's — Hunger- ford Market — The Swan Tavern and its Denizens — A Man with a Grrievance and a Devourer of Crabs — A Meeting with Soyer — Madame Soyer — A "Magic Stove" — Francatelli. In my early home we were all taught to cook. Although I am, with one exception, the sole survivor of a family of thirteen, I was in childhood the wretchedest of weaklings — rickety, purblind, deaf, hysterical, and with a chronic inflammation of the mucous membrane which caused me, at the slightest provocation of dust or a draught, to sneeze my head off," so to speak. Indeed, I may say, that my life has been almost one continuous course of catarrh : and even the movement of the Indian punkah has sufficed to set up a kind of hay-fever in that unfortunate membrane of mine. Being, then, what is called a delicate child, I was excused from the more arduous labours of the kitchen 220 THINGS AXD PEOPLE. range. I was never made to baste a joint ; and, possibly, it may be because I was sometimes made to boil a potato that I so heartily detest that questionably nutritious tuber, which, to my mind, has, since its introduction as a popular article of food — about the middle of the eighteenth century — been the curse and bane of the English kitchen. Prior to 1750 the potato was always served as a sweet dish, being dressed with cream, sugar, almonds, rosewater, and spices ; but late in the reign of George II. the general practice of potato -eating found its way from Ireland into Lancashire; and soon after- wards potatoes earned the greedy appreciation of the English people as food to be eaten with meat. To be sure, it was denounced by Cobbett as hog's food ; but then the savage old editor of the Polifical Piegister loathed tea quite as implacably as he did the potato ; and both con- tinue to retain their hold on the popular taste as articles of daily diet. So it did not fall to my lot to roast ; although I dare say I was as fond as most small people used to be of the surreptitious dainty known as a sop in the pan." The COOKS OF MY AGQUAINTANGE. 221 culinary training through which, together with my brothers and sister, I passed, included the making of soups, the artistic dressing of vegetables — I mean the sending of them to table as distinct and independent dishes, and not as mere accessories to be heaped indiscriminately on a plate already overladen with meat — the preparation of entrees, and the confection of pies and puddings. By the time I was ten years old 1 was an expert hand at dressing hashed mutton, a dish which, according to its cooking, may be either one of the most succulent or the most nauseous of foods. We were taught to make collops after the Scotch fashion, to mince the mutton, to braise it with vegetables, to make it into kebobs, to encase it in paste and fry it, to curry it, and especially to hash it ; and it was in the last form that I, considering my years, was supposed to excel. Many and many a time has my parent, when starting at about eleven in the morning on her round of singing lessons, bidden me - get the mutton well under way, to be served as a hash at four o'clock in the afternoon, which was our dinner hour. This was when my 222 THINGS AND PEOPLE. brothers and sister were all absent ; and I was, after a fashion, the housekeeper to a family of two. I sliced the cold meat carefully, dusted the slices with flour, and seasoned them with pepper and salt ; then I set the slices on a plate, and for an hour or so would dig my elbows into a big folio copy of Lyttleton's History of England " and read as hard as I could. Then I would take a writing lesson in copying the big initial letters at the beginning of the chapters ; for although, when I recovered from blindness, my sister taught me to read, I preferred to be my own instructor in calli- graphy. Many other dishes I was taught, with equal care and patience, to cook, or to assist in cooking ; and I specially remember my achievements in the way of stewing and frying tripe, of stewing kidneys — I could never eat them — of making toad-in-the-hole, and of concocting Tomato, Piquante, Proven- gale, Poor Man's " Shalot, Gravy, Eobert and Lyonnaise sauces for cutlets. For fish days I also learnt the secret of making black butter " sauce for skate. In making puddings and pastry my sister was a brighter proficient COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANGK 223 than I, her hand being lighter and her sense of dulcet flavour more delicate than mine ; but we were both beaten in the culinary competition by my brother Charles, who was six years my senior, and whom I regarded almost with venera- tion as an unequalled fabricator of meat pies. He was as grand at rumpsteak as he was at veal-and-ham, steak-and-kidney, game, and pigeon pie; but, perhaps, his steak-and-kidney pie was his masterpiece. Long years afterwards we kept bachelor house together in a little street off the Western Eoad at Brighton ; and once a week, at least, we had one of my brother's notable rump-steak pies for dinner. I w^as allowed to make the crust ; but it was he who arranged all the savoury ingredients of the pasty. When the pie was ready, I conveyed the dainty to the bakehouse ; and five minutes before the dish was to be ready for delivery my brother would pop in at the bakehouse, cause the pie to be with- drawn from the oven, delicately raise the crust, . pour in four pennyworth of cream, and then allow it to be restored for a brief space to the hot chamber. I must confess that my early culinary 224 .THINGS AND FEOFLE. reminiscences are not quite devoid of melancholy souvenirs. Oh ! the agonies of trying to make a mayonnaise sauce : the crushing with a wooden spoon of the hard-boiled yolks of eggs ; the pouring in of the oil drop drop ; the dread of having made too free with the tarragon vinegar. Often, it need scarcely be said, I made sad bungles in my cooking, and had to bear, with what resignation I might, the stern repri- mands which I so richly deserved ; but, on the whole, I was oftener rewarded with a kiss than with a scolding for what I had done in the way of dressing little dishes. Those of my culinary memories which are slightly sad are connected with the two first cooks whose acquaintance I chanced to make between 1836 and 1839. It was my duty to effect most of the household purchases ; and to that circumstance I owe the curious technical knowledge, wdiich I have never lost, of the prices current of provisions. I can trace the gradual fall in the price of tea from the period when I used to buy it at a grocer's shop kept by a Quaker, named Joshua, in Eegent Street. It was mixed tea, six shillings green and five shillings black per pound. COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 225 Coffee was half-a-crown a pound, and the best lump sugar eighteen pence ; while the best fresh butter was one and eiglitpence ; the quartern loaf varied in price between elevenpence and eightpence — I can remember it, once, at thirteen- pence — and flour was threepence a pound. New- laid eggs were three-halfpence each, and they were new-laid. This marketing rather inter- ested me than annoyed me ; nor even now, when I am old and feeble, have I ceased to take an interest in marketing, and very willingly go shopping if I am allowed to do so. But those cooks whose acquaintance I was forced to make ! Very frequently, during the London season, some musical friends would drop in about three o'clock in the afternoon ; and very often they would be asked to stay to dinner. Eubini and Tamburini, Lablache, and the Russian tenor Ivanoff, Grisi, and Persiani were among the guests whom I best remember ; and at least once I know we enjoyed the society at dinner of the fascinating Marie Malibran and her husband, M. de Beriot. The incomparable Marie Taglioni — the Sylphide of Sylpliides — was likewise sometimes of our company, as she 226 TRIXGS AXL PEOPLE. smilingly told me when, long long years after- wards, I met her, as the Countess Gilbert des Yoisins, at the memorable banquet to Literatm'e and Art given at the Mansion House during the mayoralty' of Sir Andrew Lusk. For these distinguished foreigners our house- hold would cater, in the way of such Continental delicacies as macaroni, stulfato, ravioli, polpette, risotto, and so forth, in the Milanese or the Florentine, the Grenoese or the Pioman fashion : and when a nice little dish had to be got up, say at an hour's notice, the good-natured land- lady of the house in which we occupied apart- ments made no objection to my going down into the kitchen and dressing the article wanted. Indeed, the good woman would often, in a case of boiling — that awful boiling! — lift the saucepan on and off the fire with her own hands : and, in return for her kindness, I would try next day to teach her how to make an omelette — an attempt, however, in which, as a rule, she dismally failed. The British people have done mighty things in the course of their history : they have created a vast empire in India and established a Grreater Britain at the antipodes ; they beat Xapoleon ; 000K8 OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 227 practically invented the steam-engine and rail- roads ; actually invented penny postage and per- forated postage-stamps ; but they have never, nationally, been able to make omelettes properly, and never will do so, I opine. There were occasions, however, when my parent wished to give a more than usually elaborate dinner; and on these occasions I used to be sent with a market basket — a horrible wicker pannier, dear readers, with a circular lid, with two flaps opening at the middle, and a semi-circular handle — to a French restaurant in Marylebone Street, Eegent Street. That was when we were living in the Quadrant. The restaurant was known, if I remember aright, as the New Slaughter's Coffee House; the Old Slaughter's, as all readers of Vanity Fair are aware, was in St. Martin's Lane, and the New was kept by a Frenchman of the name of Fricour. I never, to my remem- brance, was taken to dine at this house of enter- tainment ; but over and over again have I been sent thither to interview the cook and to pur- chase such delicacies as John Dory a la creme or en ravigotCy salmon with Mazarine sauce, soles a p 2 228 THINGS AND FEOFLE. la Normande, filet de boeuf a la Jeanne d'Arc, ducklings a la Chartres, pheasant a la Corsaire, vol-aU'Vent de viz de veau, cdteletfes de mouton a la Soiihise, all piping hot, which, carefully placed between "Dlates, were bestowed in the abhorred market basket. I always had a rooted, although perfectly irrational, hatred of sweetbreads and of kidneys, two dishes of which our Italian guests were passionately fond ; and I do believe that it was owing to the frequency with which I had to obtain these viands from Pricour's that I learned to abominate that which most persons consider as very delicate and tasty articles of food. The chef at Fricour's was a verj^ fat, wry man, of about fifty, with a merrily -twinkling eye. I never knew his name ; but in process of time we grew quite friendly. I can see him, now, in his full suit of white, his long knife stuck in his girdle, and his white, quadrangular cap stuck rakishly on one side of his head. Sometimes, if the afternoon was very warm, I would find him taking just a breath of air at the kitchen entrance to the restaurant ; and at these times, for fear of catching cold, he w^ould always have a table COOKS OF MY AGQUAIJSfTANGE. 229 napkin tied loosely round his neck. He was a harmonious c//e/, too, and would frequently sing to me, while he was attending to my needs, snatches from a French song called, I think, Le vin a quaf sous. One other peculiarity of his I remember very well ; and that was his habit of administering back-handed slaps on the face to his assistants, not excluding the kitchen- maids. These females would yelp a Jittle, but no harm seemed to be done; and the chef him^ell would occasionally confidentially inform me that it was impossible to govern a kitchen properly sans une plide de gifles — without a shower of slaps. I scarcely think that the market-basket excur- sions, at the period when we lived in the Quad- rant, were so grievously afflictive to me as they were wdien we resided in the upper part of Regent Street, close to the Oxford Circus. It was then my duty, when we had visitors who had to be regaled in an exceptionally elaborate manner, to take the horrible basket to Verrey's restaurant in Regent Street. I suppose there was a real Verrey fifty-five years ago, who was the founder of the famous restaurant which still •230 THINGS AXr> FFOPLE. bears his name, and pro^^pers. Yerrey was. I apprehend, a Swiss ; and he lias often been erro- neously confounded with an even more famous restaurateur in the Palais Eoyal in Paris — Very, to wit. The Palais Pioyal restaurateui' started in business as early as 1m^>5 With Verrey's co:kii:2^ in Eei^rent Street I made, of course, a very cluse acquaintance : but I was not admitted to the kitchen : and it was a waiter at the back entrance who took my modest order and brouomt me the j)Iafs to be placed in the hideous market basket. How I loathed it ! How I slunk to and from the eatino'-house with the burden that L'hoked the spring of my young life ! I have no hesitation, now. in candidly confessing' that one golden summt-r afternoon, returning from A^errey's with my accursed incubus, I sat down on the steps under the portico of a grimy church in Piegt^nt Street and burst out crying. I was comforted, curiously enough, by an Italian image bov : for the portico in question was at that ep^'cli a favourite restin^^-place for the httle swarthy lads who used to carry on their heads trays exhibiting pla-ter-casts of Queen Victoria, COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 231 Naj)oleon Bonaparte, Shakespeare, Malibran, tlie Duke of Wellington, the Djing Gladiator, the Three Graces, and Mr. Daniel O'Connell. I spoke to the image boy in his own tongue ; but whether it was that circumstance or the savoury odours evolving from the dishes in the basket that made him treat me fair, I am unaware. I am glad to say, however, that I reached home with the contents of the basket intact. I am thoroughly persuaded that no feeling of harsh- ness — to say nothing of cruelty — actuated my parent in sending me out on these, to me, agon- ising errands. Not one child in a thousand, perhaps, is entirely understood by its parents ; and I daresay that I was rather irritatingly diffi- cult to be comprehended. Touching another cook of my acquaintance in the days of my boyhood, I may say a few words before I pass to the more celebrated c/iefs whom I knew in my adolescence. We never resided in the immediate neighbourhood of Leicester Square ; else, when the operatic cele- brities were good enough to take pot-luck with us, I might have been despatched with that Avoeful basket either to Pagliano's Hotel in 232 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Leicester Square itself, an old-fasliioned edifice, which had once been the house of William Hogarth, but which was pulled down to make room for Archbishop Tenison's School ; or, per- chance, I might have been bidden to wend my way to Bertolini's Restaurant — the Hotel New- ton, I think it was called — in St. Martin's Street. The last-named establishment was kept by a Mr. Bertolini, a very worthy Italian, long domiciled in England, who contrived, I believe, to make a handsome fortune, long before the days of the Gattis and Monicos. The rumour ran that he had a handsome country house, and rode to hounds with the county families ; but, whatever may have been the extent of his prosperity, it did not prevent him from showing the most sedulous attention to all his guests, whether they dined simply or sumptuously. It was very rarely, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, that I could afford a banquet at Berto- lini's, but I liked to go there when I had sufficient cash, for the reason that the Hotel Newton was the only place with which I was then acquainted where Italian, as well as Trench, cookery flourished. COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 233 There was another and more powerful in- centive to my occasionally patronising the house. It was to a considerable extent the resort of the wits and the wags who, in the evening, habitually foregathered at the Cafe de TEurope in the Haymarket ; and there, at Bertolini's, T think I met one day Mr. Charles Dance, a once well-known dramatist. He asked me what I was doing ; and I replied that I was trying my hand at about half -a-dozen different callings, in the endeavour to earn a livelihood ; but that, on the whole, not very much success had attended my efforts. Then and there he sat down and wrote for me a letter to Shirley Brooks. Shirley gave me a cordial welcome and sent me to Albert Smith, who then lived in Percy Street, Tottenham Court Eoad. Albert, in the year 1847, was editing a comic monthly periodical called T/ie Man in the Moon, in conjunction with Angus Bethune Eeach ; and the joint editors engaged me to make comic designs on wood for The Man in the Moon aforesaid. I need scarcely say that, with the proceeds of the first cheque I received 234 THINGS AND PEOPLE, for my drawings, I dined quite festively at Bertolini's. Hungerford Market, which disappeared for ever in 1863, when it was demolished to make room for the West-End terminus of the South- Eastern Eailway and the Charing Cross Hotel, was to me, in the days of my youth, one of the most interesting places in London, I knew the history of the locality by heart — from the ghastly story of Dame Alice Hungerford, who, in the reign of Henry VIII., was hanged at Tyburn for the cruel murder of her stepson, to the tale of the burning of Hungerford House in 1669 through the carelessness of a maidservant, who was sent to take a candle off a bunch, which she did by burning the wick off, and so set the whole mansion in a blaze. It was the property of Sir Edward Hungerford, the super-refined beau who gave £500 for a periwig, and who, after having squandered a princely fortune, died a poor Knight of Windsor in Queen Anne's reign. The market which I knew was not the ugly, tumbledown building with a pent-house roof, contemptuously alluded to by John Thomas Smith, the author of the delightful Book for COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 235 a Rainy Day/' but the heavy, pseudo-Itahan structure built by Fowler, the architect of Covent Grarden Market. In the upper storey there were three avenues, all roofed, in one block ; and although Billingsgate proved in the long run too powerful for its West-End rival, the business done at Hungerford in the sale of fish was very considerable ; and there were also well-stocked shops and stalls for the sale of butcher's meat, poultrj^, game, fruit, and vege- tables. On the basement floor of the market was a large building, commonly known as the French Cliurch," from its having been used as a place of worship by the Huguenot refugees who fled to England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Then it became a Charity School for the parish of St. Martin's-in-the- Fields. In 1850 the premises had fallen into a wretchedly dilapidated condition, and they were acquired by some speculative persons, who, in view of the approaching Exhibition of the In- dustries of all Nations to be held in Hyde Park, re-erected the building in the basement as a tavern and music hall. The speculation, I believe, was a disastrous one; but, whatever 236 THINGS AND PEOPLE. might be the fortunes of Hungerford, the place itself was always full of the liveliest attractions for me. There is to most minds something irresis- tibly fascinating in a market, whatever may be the kind of commodities dispensed in the emporium. Socrates, it is true, when he was taken into the Agora, merely remarked, How many things are there here which I do not want?" But then the son of Sophroniscus was a philosopher; and I cannot afford to be philosophical, even if I had that gift. Hungerford, consequently, never failed to amuse and please me. There was the parlour of the Swan Tavern to begin with, where mys- terious London eccentrics — the race seems to have almost died out by this time — used to meet in occult conclave, saying little, but drinking cooling draughts of old ale, smoking the longest of clay pipes, and reading newspapers which, from their yellowness and raggedness, might have been the Ledgers and Postboys of the early Georgian era. On a summer afternoon the parlour at the Swan was one of the coolest and shadiest retreats into which you could dive from the feverish COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 237 buzzing and brawling of town life, the jarring of wheels and the confusion of tongues at Charing Cross ; and in that parlour I have made many curious acquaintances whose names I never knew, but from communion with whom I learnt many things. There was a man who had a grievance — most probably a wholly imaginary one — against a certain learned judge, and who followed his lordship about the streets, and when he came in and out of his house, so persistently, that at last he was given over to the police for wilfully annoying the judicial functionary whom he con- ceived to have wronged him. He must have had some small means ; for he told me that he made it a rule to purchase every Act of Parlia- ment and every Blue Book and Parliamentary Paper that was issued from the offices of the Queen's printers, so soon as ever those not ordinarily very exciting publications made their appearance. There was another individual of mildewed appearance, who, winter and summer alike, always wore a large cloak with a stand-up collar of what used to be known as ''grey poodle." Nowadays it would be dubbed astrachan. He 238 THINGS AND PEOPLE. was mncli given to devouring dressed crab, having purchased the crustacean at one of the fish-stalls in the adjacent market. The landlady of the tavern, to whom he was well known, willingly supplied him with the oil and vinegar and the condiments which he required. The quantity of dressed crab, washed down by ginger beer and hollands, which the man in the cloak habitually consumed, used first to astonish and afterwards to alarm me. I always had a horror of crab as an article of food ; and every moment I expected to see the cadaverous visage of the man in the mildewed mantle bloom forth in dark purple spots, or otherwise present itself in an aspect menacing the proximate dissolution of the unholy feeder ; but my friend in the cloak, when he was not eating crab and swallowing draughts of ginger-beer and gin from a tall pewter pot, was amicably communicative, and had a great deal to say that was worth attentively listening to. Profound erudition does not always wear a college cap and gown. So far as I could make out, the crab-devourer was a ripe Oriental scholar; and, indeed, one day he proposed to teach me Arabic COOKS OF MY AGQJJAINTANGE, 239 if I would teach him French in return. I did not get further than the Arabic alphabet, and the man in the cloak did not make much progress in the Grallic tongue beyond: Comment vous par tez- vous ? and // est quatre Ueures et demie. He was fond of repeating the latter phrase, possibly because half-past four p.m. was usually the time when he began to devote himself to dressed crab and ^\Vi^^x-\>^^x panache with gin. One afternoon, in the autumn of 1850, I was strolling through Hungerford Market with my brother. We had had a ramble into Lambeth Marsh and had returned by way of Brunei's poetically graceful aerial suspension bridge, which now spans the Avon at Clifton. We had regaled on gauffres,'' hot and hot, cooked by an indus- trious Italian, who had formerly, it was whispered, been a brigand, and ultimately took to stereo- typing, and who kept a little hut for the sale of those crisp delicacies in a street by the side of the market going down to the river. I can still see the bubbling batter being poured into the moulds and scent the odour of the cooked gauffres," as they were swiftly baked over a charcoal fire. Then I promised my relative to 240 THINGS AND PEOPLE. take liim to the Swan and introduce him to the man in the cloak. But, just as we were beginning to wend our way Swanward, my eye lighted on a gentleman who was bargaining for lobsters at one of the shops in the Central Avenue. Who can that . extraordinary individual be ? " I asked my brother. The stranger was a stoutish, tallish gentleman, a little past middle age, with closely- cropped grey hair and a stubbly grey moustache ; and, but for his more than peculiar costume, he might have been mistaken for the riding-master of a foreign circus, who had been originally in the army. He wore a kind of paletot of light camlet cloth, with voluminous lappels and deep cuffs of lavender watered silk ; very baggy trousers, with a lavender stripe down the seams ; very shiny boots, and quite as glossy a hat ; his attire being completed by tightly-fitting gloves, of the hue known in Paris as heitrre frais — that is to say, light yellow. All this you may think was odd enough ; but an extraordinary oddity was added to his appearance by the circum- stance that every article of his attire, save, I suppose, his gloves and boots, was cut on what COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE, 241 dressmakers call a bias," or as lie himself, when I came to know him well, nsed to designate as d la zoug-zoug. He must have been the terror of his tailor, his hatter, and his maker of cravats and underlinen; since he had, to all appearance, an unconquerable aversion from any garment which, when displayed on the human figure, exhibited either horizontal or perpendicular lines. His very visiting-cards, his cigar-case, and the handle of his cane took slightly oblique inclinations. He evidently knew all about shell-fish ; for he took the lobsters up one by one^ critically scanned them, poised them in one hand after the other to ascertain their weight, examined their claws, rapped them on their back, poked their sides, and offered terms for them in a mildly authori- tative tone ; terms which were at length, and not very ruefully, accepted by the fishmonger, who was possibly desirous of keeping on the best of terms with the foreign gentleman whose hat, coat, cravat, and pantaloons were all so studiously awry. ''Who is that?" said my brother, re- peating my question. Why, of all people on earth who could that be but Soyer? How do you do, Soyer?" It was in good sooth the <1 242 THINGS AND PEOPLE. noted Alexis Soyer, erst c/ief of the Eeform Club, to whom I was then and there introduced, and of whom I have had already had occasion to speak in the chapter on Thackeray. He had then, I believe, just quitted the service of the palatial establishment in Pall Mall, where a handsome salary, and the fees which he was permitted to take from improvers/' brought him an income, it was said, of not less than a thousand a year. There was not the slightest ill-feeling between himself and the committee wlien he left ; and many members of the club, including Thackeray, Sir John Easthope, Mr. Fox Maule (afterwards Lord Panmure), Mr. Edward Ellice, and Lord Marcus Hill, remained his fast friends. Alexis Soyer, however, was a very ambitious artist, and when I first met him was on the point of organ- ising a grand culinary ^ enterprise on his own account, of which enterprise I shall have in- cidentally to speak presently. In addition to this undertaking he was, like Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a dealer in '' many inventions." His Grastronomic Regenerator," a costly cookery book, of which he took care to preserve the copyright, brought him in a COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 243 large annual income ; and even larger yearly gains accrued to liim from the sale of his Modern Housewife or Menagere/' which com- prised, by the way, a bill of fare for a nursery dinner, which, Sir Erasmus Wilson said, was one of the most valuable pages that he ever read on the subject of diet, and was calculated to confer an everlasting benefit on society." Then, again, he had devised numerous condi- ments and sauces, among which I especially remember Soyer's Eelish," which was sold in vast quantities by a well-known firm of manu- facturers in London, who paid him liberal royalties for his recipes. He once told me in confidence what the Eelish was made of, and I committed the prescription to paper ; but I am sorry to say that I lost it long years ago. I , remember, however, that the foundation of the sauce was garlic. Soyer invited my brother and myself to supper that very evening. He occupied, at the time, the upper part of a house in the dim regions of Soho — a district which still retains many of its Grallic attributes, but which, in 1850, was almost as French as the Eue Montmartre. g2 244 THING8 AND FUOPLE. French charciitiers, French restaurants, hotels, barbers and han^dressers, newsvendors, cu^cukit- ing libraries, and cigar-shops encompassed his dwelling ; while the floors over the French shops were tenanted by French tailors, milliners, and dressmakers. The rooms occupied by Soyer, who was a widower, were, with one exception, very plainly furnished. The exception was in the instance of a number of very able and tasteful oil paintings by his deceased wife, a pupil of a celebrated Flemish painter named Simonau, who had been trained in the studio of the celebrated Baron Grros. Soyer was married in 1836; but six years afterwards his wife, still in the bloom of her youth, being in delicate health, died, literally terrified to death by a memorable thunderstorm. All those who have visited Kensal Green must have seen the monument to Madame Soyer. In one of the panels are visible, under glass, the palette and brushes of the lamented artist. A pretty circumstance connected with the inauguration of the monument at Kensal Green was that a wreath of laurel was placed on the pedestal by the charming danseuse, COOKS OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 24.5 Fanny Cerrito, a daughter of Terpsichore whose goodness equalled her genius and her renown, and who yet lives, I hope, as Madame St. Leon. ' The wreath was made addition- ally interesting by the fact that it had formed part of a crown which had been placed on Cerrito's brow by an Austrian Archduke, on the stage of La Scala at Milan. One other minor item connected with this monument remains to be mentioned. The question of a suitable inscription on the tomb had arisen, and someone — I am sure I do not know whether it was Jerrold, or Thackeray, or Monckton Milnes, or Bernal Osborne, or Disraeli — suggested that the epitaph could be well completed in two words, Soyer Tranquillcy In a by no means imposingly-furnished upper room, in a small ' street, the name of which has hopelessly drifted away from me, in Soho, Soyer had installed that which he proudly called his ''Kitchen at Home." It is in one of Congreve's comedies, I think, that one of the characters taunts a lady with having taken her out of a shop no bigger than a birdcage " ; and, as a matter of fact, Soyer's apartments were not of much more commanding 246 THINGS ANT) PEOPLE. dimensions than would belong to a series of moderate- sized aviaries ; but the eminently assimilative and inventive nature of the man had enabled him to set up in two or three little exiguous dens on the top floor, a miniature kitchen and larder and scullery, as complete in their way as the Avonderful kitchen and annexes which he had arranged for the Eeform Club. He had his roasting range, his oven, his screen and plate -Vv-armer ; his hain-marie pan heated by water from the adjacent boiler, his hot-plate," his seasoning box and fish sauce-box ; his refrige- rator, and his knife-cleaning machine; his dressers and tables, and plate rack. The larder was as completely furnished as the kitchen ; and on the floor beneath was his dining-room. I remember that, after we had consumed an admirable supper, which he had cooked with his own hands, with the assistance of a very small but obedient and handy Irish servant girl, with shoes hopelessly down at heel, he brought forth that which seemed to me to be a kind of conjuring api3aratus. It was his magic stove." A chop or a steak was placed on a metal tripod, of which the top was solid or barred, just as it was intended that G00K8 OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 247 the meat should be fried or broiled. At a little distance from this tripod, but quite independent of it, was a spirit lamp, and by means of some ingenious blow-pipe arrangement, a prolonged tongue of flame, so to speak, w^as projected hori- zontally from the lamp into the tripod and nnder the frying-pan or the gridiron, as the case might be, where the flame assumed a circular shape, and cooked the meat above to a nicety. Soyer, indeed, was continually inventing something, and his not altogether unreasonable anxiety that due publicity should be attained by his inventions led to his being very frequently disparaged as a charlatan. That there may have been a slight spice of the poseur in his composition it would be idle to deny ; but his foible in this direction was a perfectly harmless one, and it was more than compensated by the real talent of the man, by his great capacity for organisation, and by the manliness, simplicity, and uprightness of his character. He was, in more than one sense, a public benefactor ; and at the time of the Irish potato famine, he crossed St. George's Channel to give practical and gratuitous instruction to 248 THINGS AND PEOPLE. tlie poor in cooking cheap food other than the potato ; and after the failure of Soyer's Sympo- sium, the sumptuous Eestaurant for all Nations, which, in the year of the Great Exhibition, he opened at Grore House, Kensington, he undertook a journey to the Crimea, and not only at Balaclava, but at Scutari, achieved wonders in improving the cooking of the soldiers' rations and in arranging better scales of dietary for the military hospitals. His services gained for him the warm com- mendations of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army in the Crimea and the amicable appreci- ation of Florence Nightingale ; but I am not aware that any honorific distinction was conferred on him by the British Grovernment, or that any kind of pension or annuity was settled on him. One of his last appearances in public was at the United Service Institution, where he delivered a lecture on Camp and Barrack Cookery." Very soon afterwards, worn out by hard labour and still further enfeebled by the Crimean climate, he died. He was only a cook; but I shall always cherish the remembrance of my friendship with him. G00K8 OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. 249 not only because I sincerely admired his char- acter, but because I consider him to have been a thoroughly capable and refined culinary artist. Peace to his ma?ies ! A few years afterwards it was my fortune to make the acquaintance of another cook almost as celebrated as Soyer. This was Charles Edme Prancatelli, who had been chef to her Majesty the Queen, and whose cookery- book I consider to be quite as practical and quite as refined as Soyer's ''Regenerator/' while it is devoid of those bizarre and fan- tastic episodes with which Soyer occasionally spiced his pages. Francatelli was a very in- telligent, courteous person, whose only artistic fault was that he had an exceeding weakness for the use of truffles, with which, often with- out rhyme or reason, he pertinaciously stuffed his dishes. As a rule, three-fourths of these costly tubers have lost their scent and savour by the time that they have reached an English kitchen, and are practically worthless ; but Francatelli could not be dissuaded from con- cocting plats triiffes. My relations with him were amicable, but not of the nature of close 250 THINGS AND PEOPLE. friendsliip. In fact, I owned in a business sense about one-twelve-liundred-and-fiftieth part of him, since lie was c/ief at a club in Pall Mall of which I was elected a member two-and- thirty years ago„ 251 CHAPTEE XX. COSTUMES OF MY INFANCY. Boys in Petticoats — A "Skeleton Suit" — In Uniform — Schoolboy Attire — A Vanished Oarment — The Carlist W ar and One of its Effects — A Gorgeous Costume. I FORGET whether it is in the Almanach des Grourmands " of Grimod de la Eeyniere, or in the works of some other writer on prastronomv, that there occurs a graphic and almost terrific episode in which an epicure, who has lived not wisely but too well, sees in a vision a procession of all the good things which he has eaten and drunk during a prolonged career of gorman- dising. The procession winds its way down a mountain-side ; and at the foot of the declivity is, naturally, the Grave. Oxen by the drove ; sheep by the flock ; swine by the herd ; fruit and vegetables by the waggon- load ; wine, beer, and spirits by the hogshead ; sugar by the cask ; flour by the sack ; butter by hundreds of firkins ; eggs by hundreds of boxes, and milk by hundreds of cans ; salt and spices, coffee, tea. 252 THINGS AND PEOPLE. and cliocolate by the ton — all these comestibles pass before the eye of the dyspeptic, and it is to be hoped penitent, don vivant ; while, above, the sky is darkened by pheasants and partridges, grouse, larks, ortolans, and plover ; and flocks of geese, turkeys, and fowls hover, strut, and waddle in the outskirts of the throng, and the merry brown hares leap in and out. A sorry dream, at least when you are uncomfortably aware that in all probability there are not many more succu- lent luncheons and dinners in store for you ! With feelings happily partaking more of amused curiosity than of remorse might an elderly person review in his mind's eye the varying costumes which he has worn from his infancy downwards. Of coarse, I would not for one moment venture to suggest that such a retrospect should be undertaken by a lady ; for what fair daughter of Eve would care to remind herself of the toilettes with which she embellished her elegant form say forty or fifty years ago ? Nothing is more common than to hear a lady, when she is turning over the leaves of an old Book of the Fashions, exclaim, ''And is it possible that such frightful things as those were ever COSTUMES OF MY INFANCY. 253 worn ? " In many instances the fair critics may^ at a remote period, the existence of which they have totally forgotten, have worn the frightful things themselves. However, the sterner sex can afford to have more retentive memories ; and I am not in the least ashamed to confess that the earliest infantile costume of which I have a distinct recollection was donned at Brighton very early in the 'thirties. Indeed, I think that it was on the morning after a terrible storm ; and that, looking from the window of my little bedroom in Manchester Street, Marine Parade, I could see that what is now known as the Old Chain Pier, but which was then quite a juvenile institution, had been struck by lightning and seriously damaged. I can see now, mentally, the severed cables bent and twisted by the lightning, swing- ing to and fro in the morning blast. Children at the present time are put into sailors' garb or into little vests and knicker- bockers at so very early an age that it is by no means uncommon to meet tiny Jack Tars, or tiny Rip van Winkles, or Lilliputian Highlanders of three and four; but in the 'thirties small boys were kept in petticoats 254 THINGS AND PEOPLE. nntil an age when their appearance in such a garb would, in these days, be thought highly absurd. The short skirts which future soldiers, lawyers, doctors, and clergymen wore till they were six or seven years old, were supplemented by an abominably ugly garment called a pinafore ; not in any way resembling the pretty little blouses which tiny urchins are at present put into, but hideous gabardines of brown holland, which were tied at the shoulders by tapes. I had been emancipated from this juvenile sanhenito just before the occurrence of the great storm ; and on the morning when I beheld the shattered chains of the suspension pier at Brighton I was brought triumphantly down to breakfast by my nurse, and exhibited to the family circle in all the pride of what was known as a skeleton suit." In a word, I was ''breeched;" and in the right-hand pocket of my nether garments was placed, according to the kindly custom of that time, a bright new shilling. The coin, however, did not long retain its lustre, which I very soon tarnished by fumbling it, by the hour at a time, between my hot, moist little fingers. The skeleton " suit COSTUMES OF MY INFANCY, 255 comprised a cloth jacket, witli two rows of flat gilt buttons. Three rows would have made the wearer look like a page-boy. There was also a zone of buttons encircling the jacket, just at the termination of the basket of tlie ribs ; and to this zone were affixed the pantaloons, for they really could not be properly called trousers. They buttoned over, instead of under, the jacket, and were ridiculously short, so as to display white socks and pumps." In summer-time the wretched little slaves of a preposterous fashion wore nether garments of pink and white striped nankeen, or of white duck; but in all cases the costume was completed by a prodigiously wide linen collar with a plaited frill. The jacket had no pockets, and the equipment was destitute of a waistcoat ; so that the unhappy little urchin who had just been ''breeched" was constrained to turn his two lateral pockets into very cupboards or haversacks, the contents of which comprised such useful articles as a pocket-handkerchief and the key of that beloved box, full of unconsidered trifles, in the possession of which the smallest of children who can read and write take an infinite delight ; 256 THINGS AND PEOPLE. while, among the objects of ornament or luxury were, possibly, a marble or two, a piece of india- rubber, some coppers, a scrap of hardbake or toffy wrapped in paper, a few nuts in the season, an apple (partially munched) in summer, and a bit of slate pencil all the year round. I imagine that if anybody had given me a watch in those days I should have been constrained to add it to the miscellaneous contents of my trousers' pockets ; but in the reign of the Sailor King not one boy in a thousand, not being a little Prince, had, under the age of ten, such a thing as a watch. I have a notion that when I attended a day school kept by a kind lady, named Scott, somewhere in the region of where there is now the Montpelier Eoad, I excited considerable envy among my youthful colleagues through this same skeleton suit. You know what form envy takes among small boys and among, I am grieved to say, small girls. Envy manifests itself in the pulling of the hair, the tweaking of the ears, the accidental — accidental, of course — treading on the toes of the envied infant, and the administration of those miscellaneous nips and COSTUMES OF MY INFANCY. 257 bobs " of which poor little Lady Jane Grey had such a liberal allowance at the hands of her noble papa and mamma. However, my school- fellows were themselves gradually promoted into the wearing of skeleton suits, and I experienced no more nips or bobs ; and I daresay that, with my newly-breeched comrades, I was quite ready to envy, pinch, tease, and otherwise maltreat a particularly plump and squab-figured boy — he must have been ten — who scandalised us all one morning by making his appearance in a round jacket, a white waistcoat and trousers, and a blue silk neckerchief tied in a sailor's knot. He had a bad time, that boy, I warrant you. There was another very juvenile costume which I remember, consisting of a kind of tunic with a broad belt round the waist and a buckle. Socks were worn with this raiment ; and the head-gear was a cloth cap with a glazed peak, and a tassel hanging on one side by a silken cord. In the summer of 1839 a strange trans- formation took place in m}^ dress. I went to Paris, as I have mentioned earlier in these pages ; and, being a boy at a public school, I r • 258 THINGS AND PEOPLE. was bound to wear the authorised uniform o£ the establishment. Picture to yourself, if you please, a small boy of eleven suddenly deprived of his tunic, his large frilled collar, and his cap with the peak and tassel, and thrust into a tightly- fitting, single-breasted, closely-buttoned tail coat, which, but that its hue was either green or chocolate, bore a grotesque resemblance to the policeman's coatee as worn in the early days of the Force. My likeness to a police constable, drawn small, was enhanced by the circumstance that I was made to wear a tall hat, although it had no oil-cloth covering to the crown, and no protecting bands of leather down the sides ; otherwise, with a stiff* stand-up collar and straight- cut trousers, with a tiny strip of scarlet down the outer seams, I might well have passed for a duodecimo edition of a London ''bobby" slightly Gallicised. Coming back to England to become an English schoolboy, I was made to adopt a style of dress of which a good many patterns are still popular in boyland. The round jacket, vest, and trousers, the neck-tie and the lie-down, highly-glazed shirt collar of the Eton boy was, about 1843, largely worn in schools all COSTUMES OF MY INFANCY. 259 over England; only the Eton boy wore con- tinuously a high hat ; whereas, in middle-class seminaries, the stove-pipe " was reserved for Sundays and such whole holidays as those on which we used to be conveyed in brakes and waggonettes to Richmond or Greenwich or Hampton Court, or even Windsor, for a treat. On other days the cap was worn, and at the particular academy where I finished my boyish education we generally wore a navy cap of blue cloth, with a gold lace band. I have no remembrance of having seen in my childhood any schoolboj^s wearing any kind of wideawake or soft hat ; nor was the com- promise between a frock-coat and a jacket — the ''cutaway" or Newmarket coat — ever assumed by lads under twelve. It should, nevertheless, be noted that one article of attire worn between 1835 and 1848, not only by grown-up people, but by quite little boys, has wholly vanished from civilian society in England. This was the Cloak. I do not mean the Inverness capes which gentlemen now don with tolerable fre- quency over evening dress ; the cloak which I wore in the forties was a regular Spanish capa. r 2 260 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Something like it had been popular in France a few years previously ; the garment being cut in precise accordance with the lines of the Roman toga, as laid down by that eminent reformer of theatrical costume in France, the famous trage- dian Talma. In England the circular-cut cloak was patronised for widely different reasons. In the Spanish Peninsula a fierce war, for the succession to the Spanish Crown, was raging between the partisans of Don Carlos on one side and Dona Isabel de Borbon on the other. The Liberal party in England generally sympathised with the Isabelinos, or Christinos, as they were commonly called, after the Queen-mother and Regent, Christina ; and the Liberal Government had sent out, to assist the Christinos, a numerous body of troops, to which was given the name of the British Legion, and which was under the command of the gallant Sir De Lacy Evans. The achievements of the Legion in Spain were not very successful ; they fought on many occa- sions with great bravery, but the Spanish Constitutional Government did not treat the Legionaries with exceptional liberality ; the commissariat was from first to last miserably COSTUMES OF MY INFANCY, 261 deficient, and the men had the utmost difficulty in obtaining their pay. I can well remember, so late as 1850, seeing one-legged men, in the ragged scarlet uniform of the Legion, sweeping street crossings ; while one-armed men in the same tattered panoply used to beg in the public thoroughfares. Very soon rank impostors took up that which, for a season, was a rather re- munerative form of mendicancy ; and rogaes who had never been nearer Spain than the Spaniards'' tavern at Hampstead took to wearing cast-off Legion uniforms, which were plentiful and cheap enough in the second-hand clothes shops of Dudley Street, Holywell Street, and West Street, Smithfield. The officers of the Mendicity Society eventually managed, however, to run these rascals to earth; but meanwhile the influence of the contest in Spain began to be felt somewhat extensively in London, owing to the numbers of English gentlemen who had visited the '''Africa which begins at the Pyrenees " — either in a military capacity, or as artists or newspaper correspondents — and who brought home not only Spanish circular-cut cloaks, but the Spanish mode of draping themselves therein. 262 THINGS AND PEOPLE. The late Mr. Gruneisen, a distinguished jour- nalist, who in later life was the secretary of the Conservative Land Society, wore a cloak. He had been war correspondent of a London daily paper in Spain, and, being on the Carlist side, was within an ace of being shot as a spy when he was taken prisoner by the Christinos. Lord Ranelagh, who had also campaigned with the Carlists, wore a cloak of the same fashion after his return home, and so did Mr. Gr. P. Sargent, a well-known graphic contributor to the Venny Magazine, to whom must be ascribed the honour of having been the first of that indefatigable army of artistic war correspondents of whom Mr. Wil- liam Simpson, Mr. Sydney Hall, Mr. Frederick Villiers, and Mr. Melton Prior have since been such distinguished types. I am afraid that the gentlemen who returned from Spain very soon forgot the art of draping their cloaks in the genuine Eomano-Iberian mode, such as you may see it practised all the year round by the myste- rious, swarthy, and cigarette-smoking individuals who loaf round the fountain in the Puerta del Sol at Madrid. The cloak, however, remained. I wore COSTUMES OF MY INFANCY. 263 one when I was fourteen ; and I half fancy that the mantle in question had been in the army, and had been cut down to suit my stature. At all events, it was of blue serge, and was lined with dingy scarlet. The collar was a stand-up one, and was secured by a gilt clasp. One other sartorial aspect of my boyhood I recollect, in 1843 or 1844. I had a maiden cousin, the kindest, cheerfullest, tenderest little soul you can imagine, who, in her childhood, had absolutely been the heiress of a large sugar plantation swarming with slaves, in the West Indies : even as my own mother had been. My cousin, whenever she had the chance, used to delight in giving me a treat in the shape of an outing. I have escorted her, or rather she escorted me, to old Yauxhall, to the Surrey Zoo- logical Grardens, to Kew and Richmond, and to the annual fetes of the Eoyal Horticultural Society at Chiswick ; but the treat which she and I most heartily enjoyed was Grisi's benefit at Her Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket. The function usually took place towards the end of July. I will say nothing about the particular per- formance itself, since I only wish to complete this 264 THINGS AND PEOFLE. slight tableau of the costumes of my infancy, when I describe the apparel which I wore on a well-re- membered evening in the summer of 1 843 or 1 844. A round jacket, colour navy blue ; black velvet collar, and lappels, turned back, of white damask ; flowing white shirt collar edged with lace, white silk necktie tied in a large bow, a jahot, or shirt-frill, protruding in a crescent form, like a table napkin folded by an expert French waiter, and in the centre of the bosom a brooch of garnets. Does anyone ever wear garnets now? They say garnets are lucky stones. Then imagine very tight-fitting panta- loons of the same hue as the coat, speckled silk socks, and low shoes (brightly varnished) with large black silk bows. The most conspicuous article in my costume I have reserved to be cited last ; I wore a wonder- ful waistcoat. It was known at home as the flower-pot " waistcoat — being of lustrous poplin, or rather brocade, of blue silk, profusely embroidered with flowers of golden hue, the bouquets being tied and the waistcoat itself edged with gold thread. A most gorgeous garment, truly ; still, I am bound to acknowledge COSTUMES OF MY INFANCY. 265 that tlie gleaming fabric was part of a petticoat, which my mother had bought at a theatrical costumier's in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane. I am of opinion that in that petticoat, with a bodice to match, and a black calash, my mother had played the parts of Deborah Wood- cock in Love in a Village and Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, At all events, I feel as fully persuaded that my flower-pot " waist- coat had been on the stage, as that my out- of-door cloak had been in the army. Who had worn that brocaded petticoat, before it came into my mother's possession, I have of course no means of ascertaining. Perhaps it had been worn at the coronation of Greorge lY. ; nay, brocades wear a very long time; my ''flower- pot " vest had perchance once formed part of the dress of one of the beautiful Miss Chudleighs, or of Molly Lepel, or of Lady Betty Gferrnaine. Why not ? I went to a concert at a great palazzo at Yenice not long ago, and some of the ladies, who were members of the antique aristocracy of the city, came in brocade dresses which, I was told, were two hundred years old ; and they — the dresses I mean — did not look so very faded. 266 CHAPTER XXI. HANDWRITING OF MY FRIENDS. Autograph Prices — Character in Handwriting — Flourishes Classified- — The Origin of a Lasso " — Charles Dickens' Forked Lightning" Flourish — Compliments from Lord Brougham — His Handwriting — Mr. Beresford Hope's—Mr. Walter Thorn- bury's — Thackeray's — Douglas Jerrold's — Sir Arthur Helps'— — Charles Reade's — Mr. Gye's — " Hans Breitmann's." I HAVE been acquainted, in the course of a pro- tracted career, witli a great multitude of cele- brated people of both sexes ; and I must have re- ceived, during the last forty years, several reams of correspondence signed by all sorts and con- ditions of famous or notorious, and, in some instances, infamous folk. Yet I possess at present only a very meagre gathering of auto- graphs ; and it is with difficulty that I can realise the amount of gratification, if any, which can be derived by the autograph-hunter from his indefatigable quest of other people's signa- tures. It is useful, however, now and again, to consult the catalogue of some professional dealer in autographs — highly useful, indeed, on HANDWRITING OF MY FHIENDS. 267 Shakespeare's ''Take Physic, Pomp'' principle — especially when you find a signature of Frede- rick Louis, Prince of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, father of Helen Louisa, married to Ferdinand Duke of Orleans, son of King Louis Philippe, offered for seven shillings and sixpence ; whereas a four-page letter of your own, expressing your views on the study of classical form in art, is offered for eighteenpence. In the same cata- logue the autographic value of Frederick, Duke of York, is three shillings ; and for this sum is procurable the signature of Mr. Galignani, the once eminent Parisian publisher. The sign manual of the gallant Admiral, Lord Exmouth, who bombarded Algiers, goes for half-a-crown, which is the selling price of the elder William Farren ; but a letter from Colonel Marcus Despard is quoted at nine and sixpence — the price asked for a letter from Charles Dickens to his schoolfellow and early friend, Thomas Mitton. To be sure, it was the gallant Colonel Despard's fate to close a distinguished military career by being hanged, drawn, and decapitated at Horsemonger Lane Graol for the crime of high treason. 268 THINGS AND PEOPLE. As for Mr. Gladstone, an autograph note of liis in the thhd person only fetches half-a- crown ; but twenty-five lines in the autograph of Thomas Hood, addressed to Sir Walter Scott, may be considered cheap at half-a-guinea. Alto- gether, the traffic in autographs, like the passion for possessing them, is to me a mystery. Again, it is possible that the very slight value which I attach, as a rule, to autographs, may be due to the ch'cumstance that I am an entire disbeliever in the so-called science of graphology," although I have read with much interest a book, published not long since, called Handwriting and Expression," translated from the French of M. J. Crepieux-Jamin by Mr. J ohn Holt Schooling. I am not at all open to the conviction that — save in very rare instances — the handwriting offers any trustworthy evidence as to the writer's character ; and, in defence of my scepticism in this regard, I may say some- thing very briefly and, I hope, modestly, about my own calligraphy, which, as a good many people are aware, is peculiar. I write a very small hand, which, some ten years ago, was very legible, but which is now rapidly becoming the HANDWRITING OF MY FRIENDS, 269 reverse. There are three reasons for this indis- tinctness : first, as a child I was for a long time quite blind, and when I recovered my sight I taught myself to write from a book in large print, Lord Lyttelton's History of England." I remember very well drawing every particular L character in the alphabet, large and small, capitals and minuscules, vertically and diagon- ally ; and I daresay that, during the process of copying, I put my tongue out, and made the organ of speech follow the motion of my pen, just as you may have seen servant-maids do when they indite an epistle beginning, say : " Miss Sarah Jane Smith presents her compli- ments to Mrs. Soapsuds, and I must have more starch in my cuffs, which thank Goodness it leaves me at present." The next reason for my writing a minute hand is, that in my early adolescence I scraped together sufficient money to apprentice myself to an engraver, and went conscientiously, not only through the artistic processes of my craft, but through the much humbler business of engraving bill-heads, and invoices, and visit- ing cards, backwards, on copper-plate. Finally, 270 THINGS AND PEOPLE. my handwriting became habitually minute, be- cause ever since my boyhood I have been in the habit of keeping extracts, commonplace books, and memoranda of every description ; and had I not written very small, I should have by this time several shelves groaning with elephant- folios full of my scribblings. But we will come now, only for a moment, to the question of character in handwriting. I always append to my signature a kind of flourish — that which the French call a jjarajj/ie ; and I notice in Handwriting and Expression" a list of these flourishes, including the ''lasso," the ''forked lightning," the "arachnoid," the snail," the " corkscrew," and the " wavy " — a different human idiosyncrasy being assigned to each variety of flourish. Looking at the facsimiles of these flourishes, I find that I have a " lasso " paraplie, and, according to M. Crepieux-Jamin, the "lasso" flourish signifies " defensiveness becoming aggressive." As a random shot this is not a very bad one : seeing that I have generally had to defend something or somebody, and not unfrequently myself ; and I may have been occasionally HANDWRITING OF MY FRIENDS, 271 aggressive in resisting attack ; but it so happens that the lasso -like flourish was not an instinctive one, but that I deliberately adopted it from the signature of a French schoolmaster of mine, fifty-three years ago. His name was Henon ; and I have one of his quarterly school bills before me, now, with a most portentous ''lasso ' after the final ''n," reaching a good inch and a half down the page. Possibly there may be relatives or schoolfellows of Charles Dickens alive who can account for the forked light- ning" horizontal zig-zag flourish which he always appended to his signature. This forked horizontal zig-zag appears under his name in the engraving of the portrait by Daniel Maclise; but, oddly enough, it happens that I possess a pirated copy of Oliver Twist," in which there is a signature unfamiliar to European eyes, published in New York, 1841. Even the illus- trations by George Cruikshank are forged — and very cleverly too ; but the frontispiece is a por- trait of Dickens as a very young man, with the signature ''Boz," with one horizontal stroke beneath, and no more. I have never seen an English copy of the portrait, and do not know 272 THINGS AND PEOPLE. whether this Boz " is a facsimile or an impu- dent invention. Of the very many letters which, during a long course of years of close friendship, I received from the illustrious novelist, I have retained only one, and I find the solitary example pasted dow^n — not by my hands I feel sure — in a vellum- bound account folio full, not only of autographs, but of caricatures of my friends and myself, cards of invitation, photographs, play-bills, and a letter written nearly a hundred j^ears ago from Deme- rara by my maternal grandfather to my mother, then a little girl at school in England. Dickens's letter is dated from the office of Jll the Year Round, August 19th, 1868, and simply announces the enclosure of a cheque for fifteen pounds. The billet is written in the old familiar Stephens's dark blue ink, and the ''forked lightning" flourish is as bold as ever. According to M. Crepieux- Jamin, Dickens's signature by this time should have grown irresolute ; since he was in far from good health, and in less than two years after- wards he was dead. I have not a single Thackeray in my possession ; and for this bereavement I can KANDWRITING OF MY FRIENDS. 273 account, just as well as I am able to do for tlie almost total absence of communications in the hand of Charles Dickens. All my autograph letters from the two great writers whom I have named have been politely begged from me by public libraries and literary and scientific insti- tutions in England and in the United States. Furthermore, I may hint that once in every seven years or so I yield to an uneasy conviction that I am about, at no great distance of time, to join the majority ; and while I am under the influence of that which is perhaps only a tem- porary fit of hypochondria, I either give away some of my most valued autograph letters to my friends, or else I make a bonfire-royal of a couple of hundred letters or so. I am glad, nevertheless, to say that I know the whereabouts — although I have it not in my own custody — of one at least of about a dozen letters which I received from Lord Brougham. The great orator and statesman was noted for the kindly encouragement which he was always ready to extend to young and struggling men of letters. It is many, many years since I first met him at a Mechanics' Institute soiree, at 8 274 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Huddersfield, in Yorkshire. The Lord of Vaux was in the chair; and I had to make a speech. I have not the slightest remem- brance of what the speech was about ; and as I had never before set eyes on the famous ex-Chancellor, and I was sitting close to him, I own that I felt desperately frightened. I stum- bled through my sentences somehow or another; and then the good old man shook me cordially by the hand and said some very kind things to me. A few weeks afterwards I received a letter from hmi in London asking me to come to a public meeting at St. James's Hall, on which occasion he was to preside. The meeting was to discuss the question of middle-class education , and he evidently expected a large attendance of the clergy, since, in a postscript, he remarked, he did not wish the Bishops to have things all their own way." On the morning of the meet- ing I received another note from him asking me to call upon him, as early in the forenoon as I could, at his house in Grraf ton Street. The well- remembered mansion was at the bottom of the street, facing Bond Street. In a very dusty old dining-room I found the venerable statesman in HANDWRITING OF MY FRIENDS. 275 his customary attire of black body-coat and waistcoat, an immensely high black stock, and the historic checked trousers. By the way, Robert Brough, humorist, dramatist, and poet, used to say that the fluted columns of the ex- terior of the Church of the Madeleine, which are constructed on the tambour " principle, the fluted shafts being not monolithic, but so many superposed discs of stone, always reminded him of Lord Brougham's trousers. He had sent for me — so said the British Demosthenes — to give me a few hints on public speaking ; and this he did, not only then, but on two subsequent occasions. It is, however, with the handwriting of this great Englishman, and not with his personal relations with me, that I have to deal. What his calligraphy in youth or in his maturity may have been like I do not know, but at the ad- vanced age when I enjoyed the honour of his friendship, he wrote about the most execrably illegible and ungainly scrawl that, with one ex- ception, I have ever gazed upon. The only simile which will serve to give my readers an idea of his fist '' is the very hackneyed one of a s 2 276 THINGS AND PEOPLIJ. spider dipped in ink being allowed to crawl over a sheet of paper. He always signed H. Brougham/' instead of Brougham/' just as the Earl of Eosebery signs ''A. Eosebery/' One other letter from the renowned statesman, who when he was Harry Brougham " held the House of Commons in the hollow of his hand, had reference to a leading article which I wrote in the Daily Telegraph more than thirty years ago. The paper had reference to the expediency of appointing a Public Prosecutor, and this expediency Lord Brougham remarked that he ''gravely doubted." I have said that I know of one other sample of handwriting as shockingly illegible as that of Lord Brougham. It was the writing of the late Mr. Beresford Hope. Up and down, in and out, and round the corner, some of the letters stand- ing on their heads, others standing prostrate," as Lord Castlereagh put it — others apparently engaged in mortal combat with their next neigh- bours — the ultimate result. Chaos. That was the calligraphy, or the cacography, of worthy, clever Mr. Beresford Hope. The late Walter Thornbury, traveller, and historiographer, in HANDWRITING OF MY FRIENDS. 277 conjunction with Mr. E. Walford, of Old and New London/' also wrote a disastrously bad hand. The prevailing impression in your mind was that not ink, but a succession of small bomb-shells had been discharged from' poor Walter's pen, and that these petards had exploded on the paper. On the whole, were I called upon to come into any court and make affidavit as to the handwriting of my literary friends, I should say that the finest calligrapher of all was Thackeray. He had two distinct handwritings : a cursive and slanting one, and a vertical or upright hand, in which every letter was distinctly formed. Both hands were, to my mind, inimitably beautiful. Douglas Jerrold, as a letter-writer, wrote a bold, decisive hand; but his copj^ " was in almost microscopically small characters. I have seen the bound manuscript of his strange novel, ''A Man Made of Money; " and I doubt whether even a reader with powerful eyes could decipher that MS. without the aid of a magnify- ing glass. I find in the book of scraps to which 1- have alluded several very kind letters from 278 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Sir Arthur Helps, the author of Friends in Council." He wrote a typically official fist," large, clear, decisive, and not devoid of sym- metry. One communication, written in 1874, had reference to those very cruel devices — not yet, I am sorry to say, abandoned — for the. torture of horses : the bearing-rein and the gag- bit. He wanted me to write something de- nouncing that which most people think to be a barbarous and useless practice ; but I told him, in reply, that an anti-bearing-rein movement must, to have any chance of success, be initiated by the very highest classes in society ; and in his letter in answer he wrote, I am afraid you are right; we must begin with the duchesses. I have already had the audacity to try what I can do with them, and I must persevere." Next to Sir Arthur I find an invitation to dinner from dear old Charles Eeade. A big, fighting, ''hit- ting between the e^^^es " hand — a sprawl ; but a giant's sprawl. He disdained to fold the pages of his letters, and went right across the sheet. Then do I chance on a note addressed to me in April, 1875, from the Royal Italian Opera, in a neat, delicate, almost feminine Italian hand, HANDWBITING OF MY FRIENDS. 279 signed Fred Grye." I had sent him from Venice a note expressing the enthusiastic admir- ation which I felt for a young prima donna by the name of Albani, whom I had heard at the Fenice Theatre, on the occasion of a gala per- formance held in honour of the visit of the Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria to Victor Emanuel, King of Italy. I am delighted," writes Mr. Gye, ''to see that you, as well as the Venetians, know how to appreciate the charming talent of Mademoiselle Albani, who,'' he adds, is about to sing in the Sonnambula, at Covent Garden," Followmg Mr. Gye's is a letter of eight pages from Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland, otherwise " Hans Breitmann," a very constant correspondent of mine in days of yore. A fine, flowing, legible masculine hand, setting down things sensible and sagacious. INDEX. Abbeville, i. 150 A'Beckett, Gilbert Abbot, i. 44; caricatured by the author, 88 Adams, Charles Francis, i. 214 Adams' Express Company, i. 233, 234 Admii-alty, The, semaphore on the roof of, i. 201 ; courtyard of, 201 Advertisement duties, and indigent pubhshers, ii. 65 ^Eneas, his meal on the Punic coast and his invitation from Queen Dido, ii. 209, 210 Ainsworth, Harrison, his "Jack Sheppard," ii. 157 Alamode beef dinners, ii. 202 — 204 ; the sauce served with, 203, 204 Alboni, Maria, in Maria di Rohan at Covent Garden Theatre, ii. 124 — 127 ; her picture by the author, 126, 127 Aiken, Hemy, i. 99 Almonte, General Don Juan Ne- pomucene, ii. 25, 26 America : Change in meaning of term "Democrats," i. 224; author's experience in the country, 210 — 268; Centmy Club, 225; voyage from England thirt}^ years ago, 213 ; lavish expenditm'e on entertainments during the war, and the issue of "greenbacks," 227 — 230 ; sleeping-cars and rail- way travelling, 230 — 234 ; Adams' Express Company, 233, 234 ; Custom House, 234 — 236 ; smug- gUng, 236; spies, 236, 237; abuse between Federals and Con- federates, 237 ; steam-boat travel- ling, 239—241 ; the Federal army, 241 — 248 ; patriotic lyrics of Con- federate army, 248 Americans : in Paris, i. 215, 216 ; in- justice done to them by English writers, 216 ; epithets applied to the author, 218, 219 Amozoc, Spurs of, ii. 4 Anderson, Professor, ii. 121, 123 Anecdotes and Incidents : Thack- eray's remark to the "Professor," i. 17; the "Professor's" estimate of Thackeray, 17 ; Thackeray's remark to Dr. Bellows, 18; Thack- eray's speech at a CornhUl dinner, 32, 33 ; Thackeray's jocular pro- posal at a Greenwich dinner, 39 ; reputed authorship of the "Ves- tiges of Creation," 46; alterations by Dickens in author's " copy," 79 ; a French tailor's notion of "arriving," 123; Dickens and Ary Scheffer, 132 ; tips to the Brighton coachman, 202, 203 ; Robert Stephenson and Paxton's plans for the Great Exhibition buildings, 208, 209; John Van Buren addressing electors in his shii't - sleeves, 225 ; Nathaniel Parker Willis and "Willis's Rooms," 226 ; a. young - lady smuggler in America, 236 ; Bar- num and the beefsteak, 239 ; the gamblers and an American Minister, 240, 241; "Bibles" and smuggled spii'its in the Federal amiy, 243 ; Mrs. Lincoln announcing dinner, 254 ; the black hotel-keeper and the invalid lady, 257 ; the American lady and her deceased husband's " casket," 259; 260 ; the cow-boys and the lecture on Junius, 260 ; the humorist counting the steps, 261 ; Abraham Lincoln, and the lady soliciting an appointment for a relation, 266 ; well-starched white ducks, ii. 5 ; the Federal lieutenant boarding a i passenger steamer, 13 ; the French 282 THINGS AND PEOPLE, money-lender and his wife, 33, 34 ; "Mr. Thorough" the money- lender, 42, 43 ; " Mr. Quasimodo " and Mr. Serjeant Wilkins, 45 — 47; Dickens and the impecunious man of letters at the Freemasons' Tavern, 57 ; Captain Jack I , and Tommy D in a spunging house, 60, 61 ; insolvency of a commissioner of insolvency, 62 ; the sheriff's officer and his daughter in a spunging house, 63 ; heraldic achievement of a prisoner at Whitecross Street, 68 ; the professor of theology and the winners of the Derby, 103 ; Charles Kean and the tom-cat, 121 ; a criticism on Madame Alboni's voice, 125 ; Eossini and Sir Henry Bishop's name, 140 ; laying the ghost of a portrait by Guido Reni, 161, 162 ; the waiter at the " Cock," and the hard- boiled egg, 187, 188 ; the waitress and the barrister, 208, 209 ; a post- prandial speech at the Old Beef- steak club, 215, 216 ; the Italian image boy and the author, 230, 231 Anglo -Parisian Cockneys," i. 109, 110; their place of residence in Paris 110, 111, 118 ; their delight at Dickens's visits, 112 ; idleness in Paris, 115; impecuniosity, 113, 117, 119, 127 ; and Madame Busque, 118 ; their dinners and breakfasts, 118, 121, 122 Anglophobia in Paris, i. 173 — 175 Antiqumij, The, musical play, ii. 138 Arabic chorus, An, ii. 141 Army, The : The abolition of the purchase system and its effect on money-lenders, ii. 37 Artaxerxes at St. James's Theatre, ii. 128—131 Ashbury, Mr. James, ii. 11, 12 Athens, ii. 9 Auber, and La Parisienne,'''' ii. 148 Autograplis : Market prices, ii. 267, 268 ; as evidences of the writers' characters, 268, 270 ; of Charles Dickens, 271, 272; given away to institutions, 273 ; Lord Brough- I am's, 276. {See also Hand- writing) . I Aztec ruins, ii. 10 Bacon, His allusions to usurers, ii. 35 I Balfe, Michael, ii. 139 ; marriage of a daughter to Sir John Cramp ton, 139 ; his Siege of Rochelle, 149 Balls at American hotels, i. 255 Bancroft, George, i. 222 Bankruptcy confined to traders fifty- five years ago, ii. 62 Barlow, Samuel L. M., Library of, i. . 223 Barnett, John, ii. 137, 139 ; his Mountain Sijlpli, 149 Barnett, Morris, ii. 137 Barnum, Phineas Taylor: author's acquaintance with him, i. 220 — 222 ; and the beefsteak, 239, 240 Barry, Sir Charles, and Paxton's plans for the Great Exhibition Buildings, i. 209 ^ ^ Bayard, Senator, i. 259 ; his anecdotes of Western cowboys, etc., 260 Bayly, Thomas Haynes, and " She wore a wreath of roses," ii. 150 Bazaine, Marshal, in Mexico, ii. 6, 21, 31 Beau, A, of 1836, ii. 78, 79 Beauvais, i. 152 Beers, Mr. Jan Van, and Goya's " Disasters of War," ii. 165 Beggars in France, i. 147, 148 Bellows, Rev. Dr., and Thackeray's visit to America, i. 18, 225 Belmont, August, of New York, i. 215 Belt libel case, and the examination of the author, ii. 119 Bennett, Mr., in Artaxerxes, ii. 128 Bennett, James Gordon, Author's first interview with, i. 210, 211 ; his hospitality to the author, 219 Bennett, Sir John, and a dinner at the Old Bailey, ii. 211 Beranger, his glorification of Na- poleonism, i. 189 Beresford, Inspector, and gambling hells, ii. 95 Berryer, M. , defends Louis Napoleon, i. 185 Bertolini's Restaurant, ii. 232 INDEX, 283 Beverly, William Roxby, his kind- ness to the author at the Princess's Theatre, i. 5, 6 ; his picture of a scene in The Night Dancers, ii. 170 Bill-discounters {see Money-lenders) Bishop, Mrs., in Rob Roy, ii. 136 Bishop, Sir Henry R., ii. 131 ; and Rossini, 140 Blackwood, Mr., and the suppers at Ambrose's Tavern, i. 82 Blanchard, Mr., as "Gilbert Glossin" in Guy Mannering, ii. 137 ; in The Antiquary, 138 Blanchard, Laman, editor of the Omnibus, i, 94 Blanchard, Sidney, i. 77, 94 Blomfield, Lord, i. 253 Bohemians, English, in Paris, i, 109, 110, 115, 116 — 118 ; forty years ago and now, 113, 114 Bosquet, General, ii. 31 Boulogne, A journey in 1839 to, i. 135 — 139 ; examination at the Cus- tom House of, 141—144 ; the lug- gage porters of, 141 ; Louis Napo- leon's "invasion" of, 183 — 185 Braham, John, manager of St. James's Theatre, i. 48 ; in the Village Coquette, inArtaxerxes, ii. 128 ; in Guy Mannering, 137 Breach of promise case, A remarkable defence in a, ii. 46, 47 Bread, Former price of, ii. 225 Brigands in Mexico, ii. 6, 7, 22 Brighton, Camera Obscura at, ii. 10; a pantomime in 1835 at, 106 — 110 ; scene in a drawing-room at, 145 ; exhibition of John Martin's pic- tures, 168 Brighton, Railway to, i. 199, 200 ; coach-ride to, 202 ; early carriages on the railway to, 205 British Auxiliary Legion, The, ii. 91, 260 Brooks, Shirley, i. 85 ; ii. 233 Brooks's Club, ii. 174 Brough, Robert Barnabas, i. 21 ; one of the ' ' Anglo -Parisian Cockneys, ' ' 111 ; his parody on "The Low- backed Car," 152 Brough, William, i. 21 ; one of the Bohemian Cockneys in Paris, 111 Brougham, Lord, ii. 214 ; at a meet- ing in Yorkshire, 274 ; his dress, 275 ; his handwriting, 275 Browning, Robert, at a CornhiU dinner, i. 30 Brunei and sleeping-cars, i. 238 Buckingham, Leicester, i, 21 Bunn, Alfred, his retort on Punch, i. 87—89 Burdett-Coutts, Baroness, ii. 145 Buren, Mr. John Van, i. 224 Burgojme, Field-Marshal Sir John, i. 30 Busque, Madame, her cremerie in Paris, i. 118, 215 Butt, Mr. Isaac, ii. 48 Bryant, Wm. Cullen, i. 225 Cafe -concerts in Paris, i. 178 Campbell, Lord, and the Old Beef- Steak Club, ii. 214 Canada, Dispatch of British troops during American War to, i. 212 Cantiniere, A French, in Mexico, ii. 23, 24 Capias ad satisfaciendum. The writ of, ii. 52, 53, 54, 57 Carteret, Sir Philip, and Samuel Pepys, i. 155 Carlton House, The approach to, ii. 174 Cato Street Conspiracy, and Arthur Thistlewood, ii. 93, ^94 Cavaignac, General, ii. 31 Cenci, Beatrice, Apocryphal portrait of, ii. 160—162 Ceylon, ii. 9 Chambers, Robert, i. 38 Chapiu, Dr., of New York, i. 220, 221 Chapultepec, ii. 4 Chase, Mr., i. 254 Children, Costumes of, ii. 257 — 259, 262, 263 Chiswick Parish Church, ii. 199 Chop-houses, Luncheons of City merchants at, ii. 200—202 Christian Commission, The, during the American War, i 244 Christmas Days : Difficulty of recall- ing the way they were spent, ii. 104, 105 Cider cellars, i. 21 284 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Clare Market, Money-lenders in the neighbourhood of, ii. 39 Clari, tJie Ilaid of Milan, Miss Maria Tree in, ii. 137 Clifford's Inn, A dinner at, ii. 217, 218 Cloak, The Spanish, worn in Eng- land, ii. 259—262 Clubs : Their development during the reigns of George IV. and William IV., ii. 174; book on the subject published in 1828, 175 Club, Century (New York), i. 225 Crockford's, ii. 61, 84, 89, 94 Deanery, i. 10 FieMing, i. 20, 22 Garrick, i. 3 Old Beefsteak, ii. 175, 213—216 Reform, i. 34, 35 Beunion, i. 21 Coach -travelling from London to Brighton, i. 202 Cobbett, William, compared with Dickens, i. 103, 107, 109; his knowledge of the French language, 107 — 109 ; his denunciation of the potato, ii. 220 Coffee, its introduction into England, ii. 187 Coffee-house, Potter's, i. 7, 8 ; Peele's, ii. 188 ; New Slaughter's, and Old Slaughter's, 227 {seeol^o Taverns) Cofre of Perote, The, ii. 9 Collins, Charles, Association of Dickens with, i. 106 Collins, Wilkie, Association of Dickens with, i. 106 Combermere, Lady, ii. 145 Confederate army. Patriotic lyrics of, i. 248 Conscripts in France, i. 149 Consort, The Prince, his blameless example, ii. 94 Cook, Mr. Douglas, editor of the Saturday lievietv, i. 38 Cooke, Mr. Grattan, i. 58 ; ii. 130 Cooke and Wheatstone's Magnetic Needle Telegraph, i. 199 Cooking taught in the author's child- hood, ii. 219, 221—224 Cooks of the past : The chef at Fri- cour's, ii. 228, 229 ; Soyer, 240— 249 ; Charles Edme Fraucatelli, 249, 250 Copper captains," ii. 60, 92 Collecting-boxes for charitable so- ! cieties, i. 1*^7, 138 Cornhill Magazine, its commence- ment, i. 28 Corsican Brothers, The, i. 100 Costumes of the past : Their great variety, ii. 252 ; of children, 253 — 257 ; of schoolboys in Paris, 258 ; of schoolboys in England, 259, 264 ; cloaks of Spanish origin, 259, 262, 263 Cotton, Sir Vincent, and the Brighton- coach, i. 202 Cotton famine. The, i. 212 Covent Garden Theatre, Harlequin and Friar Bacon at, ii. 113 ; de- stroyed by fire, 123 Coyne, Stirling, i. 21 Crampton, Mr., and the American Secretary of State, i. 250 Crampton, Sir John, i. 253 ; ii. 139 Crepieux- Jamin, M., on handwriting, ii. 268, 272 Crimean War, and W. H. Russell's letters to the Times, i. 125 ; and the work of Florence Nightingale, 125 Crockford's, ii. 61, 84, 89 ; broken up, 94 Cruikshank, George : Author's intro- duction to him, i. 58 ; his illustra- tions of "Jack Sheppard," ii. 157 Cruikshank, Isaac Robert, his por- trait of Joseph Grimaldi, ii. 113 Crystal Palace, and Sir Joseph Pax- ton's plans, i. 208, 209 Cumbres, The, ii. 4, 9, 22 Cunard Line, The, i. 213, 214 Custom House at Ventimigha, ii. 156 Custom House officers at Boulogne, i. 139, 142—144 ; in America, 234— 236 Daily Telegraph, Boxing night, article on the Drury Lane panto- mime for, ii. 122 ; article on the expediency of appointing a public prosecutor, 276 Dance, Charles, ii. 233 Debt, Imj)risonment for, ii. 53 — 69 Debtors' Act of 1869, its effect on INDEX. 285 the money-lending profession, ii. 37 Delafield, Mr., and Covent Garden Theatre, ii. 124 Delavigne, Casimir, author of " La Parisienne," i. 150 ; ii. 148 Derby, The : A German professor and the winners, ii. 103 Dibdin, Charles, and The Lord of the 3Ianor, ii. 132 Dicey, Edward, i. 226 Dickens, Charles : And Thackeray, i. 3 ; myths regarding him, 46 ; his greatness, 47 ; writes the Hbretto of The Village Coquettes, 48, ii. 127 ; the author's first impressions of him, i. 50, 51 ; his appearance and dress as a young man, 51 ; his portrait by Daniel Maclise, 51 ; the dawn of his popularity, 51 — 54 ; early experiences, 52, 53 ; acquaintance with the author's family, 54 ; writes The Strcmge Gentleman, 55 ; dramatised ver- sions of his "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby," 55, 56 ; his first successes in the United States, 56 ; opinion of the author's sketches, 62 ; his appearance in middle life, 60, 74 ; his editorship oi House] I old Words, and his accept- ance of contributions from the author, 67 — 82 ; his conversational powers compared with those of Thackeray, 75, 76 ; hatred of shams, 77 ; his imitators, 77 ; chairman of Houseliold Words dinners, 84, 90 ; fondness for entertaining police-officers, 95, 96 ; his trips to Paris, 97 ; absence of Gallicisms in his writings, 103 ; good - humoured contempt for foreigners, 104 ; lack of apprecia- tion for " High Art," 105 ; fond- ness for Continental travel, 106 ; association with Wilkie and Charles Collins, 106 ; French scholarship, 107 ; compared with Cobbett, 103, 107, 108; slight acquaintance with French literature, 108, 109 ; visits to Paris between 1851 and 1855 and fraternising with the ' ' Anglo - Parisian cockneys," 112, 113; breakfast in Paris with the author, 123—126; ''getting up" Macau- lay's "history," 124, 125; liking for old-fashioned hotels, 126, 127 ; and Victor Hugo, 128 ; partiality for the Palais Royal restaurants, 130; love for the theatre, 131, 132 ; portrait by Ary Scheifer, 132 ; on the men of the United States, 265; his practical knowledge of legal processes illustrated in "Pick- wick," ii. 56 ; at a dinner at the Freemasons' Tavern, 57 ; the assimilative power of his genius, 76 ; his pictures of fast life and his ideal flunkey, 75, 76 ; and the "Life of Joseph Grimaldi," 113; his autograph, 271, 272 Dickens, Junior, Charles, dinner given on his departure for China, ii. 56 Diet of schoolboys in Paris, ii. 191 — 194 BiViqenee, Travelling in France by, i. 145—154 Dinners : Of schoolboys in Paris, ii. 193 ; in a Postal ozzian academy, 195 — 198 ; at City chop-houses, 200 — 202 ; at an eating-house on Holborn Hill, 202 ; at alamode beef shops, 202—204; at the " Thirteen Cantons," 203, 204 ; at Williams's Boiled Beef House, 205 — 209 ; in the dining-room of the Old Bailey Court, 210—213 ; at Clifford's Inn, 217, 218; at the old Beefsteak Club, 213—216 ; at the mess-room, St. James's Palace, in the Bank of England, and at the Tower, 218 "Dixie," and other lyrics of the Confederate army, i. 248 Dormer, Nicholas, and the Holy Well at the " Old Dog " Tavern, ii. 179, 180 D'Orsay, Count Alfred, ii. 78 Doyle, Richard, at " Soyer's Sym- posium," i. 13 ; 44, 59 Draughtsmen, Railway, their earn- ings during the railway mania, i. 204, 205 Drinking habits in former times, ii. 182, 185, 186, 202 286 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Drunkenness, Punishment in the Federal army for, i. 242 ; its decrease in London, ii. 71. 73 Drury Lane Theatre, Za-Ze-Zi-Zo- Zoo at, ii. 114, 115 Duffeiiu, Lord, i. 253 ; ii. 145 Dumas the yoimger, Alexandi-e, i. 129, 188 Duruset, Mr., in The Auilqiiari/^ ii. 138 Duval, Claude, and Great Swallow ^Street, ii. 174 Ecole de Natation, Paris, i. 179 Edwards, Mr. Henry Sutherland : One of the ''Anglo-Parisian Cock- neys," i. Ill ; contributes to the Figaro, 111 ; business transactions in Paris, 116 Egan, Pierce, his description of " fast " life in London, ii. 72 Egerton, Mr. and Mrs., in Boh Boi/, ii. 136 EUerton, Mr. John Lodge, composer of the "Evening Gun/' ii. 144 ElKot, Sii' Hemy, i. 253 Ellis, Mr. George, i. 100 ; ii. 120 Emery, Sam, i. 21 ; in Guy Mauner- i)ig, ii. 137; in The Antiquary, 138 Epicure, A vision appearing to an. ii. 251 Essex, Countess of, and her nieces, ii. 129 Evans, General Sii* de Lacy, and the British Legion, ii. 91, 260 Evans's Supi3er Rooms, i. 86 Evarts, Mr. WilKam Maxwell, Anec- dote told by, i. 259, 260 Evening ch'ess. Influence on maimers of, ii. 73 Fashions in the early part of the Queen's reign, i. 61 ; at the present time, 135 Fast life of the past : different from that of the present, ii. 70, 71. 73: reaction dming the Restoration, 71 ; the AYliipping Toms and Mo- hocks, 71 ; as depicted by Pierce Egan, 72; in "Xicholas Nickleby," 74 — 76 ; in St. Giles's, 80 ; practi- cal jokes of the "Mad Marquis" and the Hon. Billy D , 80—86 ; gambling, 86 — 96 ; night -houses, and the condition of theHaymarket, 96—102 Faucit, Mrs., in The Antiquary, ii. 138 Federal army during American War : Mode of punishment for drunken- ness, i. 242 ; teetotalism and smug- gled di'inks. 243 : care bestowed by the Sanitary Connnission and the Christian Commission, 244 ; ab- sence of corporal punishment, 245; "spread-eagling," 245 ; influeuQe of Pmitanism, 247 : verses adapted to the tune of " John Brown," 247, 248 Field, Inspc::-or. i. 95, 96 Fielding C l i'^ Author's meeting with Thackeray at the. i. 22, 23 Fielding's bm'lesque of Tom Thujnb the Great, ii. 133 Fieri faeias. The wi'it of. ii. 52, 53 -Filthy bluebelHes," i. 237, 246 Fitzwilliam, Mr., in The Heart of Midlothian, ii. 138 Fleet Prison, The, ii. 55, 56, 58, 65 Forey, General, ii. 31 Forster, John, i. 29 ; allusion to his " Life " of Dickens, 49 Francatelli, Charles Ecbne, ii. 249 France : Gendarmes, i. 140, 141 ; passports, 142; Custom House, 141, 142; travelling hj diliyenee, 145 — 154 ; beggars, 147 ; poplar-bor- dered roads, 148 ; villages, 148 ; conscripts, 149 ; and Mexico, ii. 30, 31 ; usui-ers amongst the peas- ants, 39 Francis, John Deffett, i. 21 Freemasons' Tavern, Dinner in hon- j om- of Charles Dickens, jr., at, ii. ' French usm-er, Anecdote of a. ii, 33, I 34 ! Fretillon, Madame, ii. 79 ; and the Mad Marquis.'* 85 Frias, Duke of, ii. 139 _ Fricour's Restaurant, ii. 227. 228 Gallenga, Antonio, i. 268 Gambling : On American Steamers, i. 240, 241 ; at Madame Une Telle 's estabhshment, ii. 87—89 ; at Crock- INDEX. 287 ford's 89 ; at houses in the neigh- j bourhood of Leicester Square, 90 ; the " Greeks," 90—92; Jack Thur- tell and his victim, 92, 93 ; and Arthur Thistlewood, 93, 94 ; break- ing -up of the " hells," 95 Garrick Club, The, i. 3 Garrick's Head Hotel, ii. 123 Gaskell, Mrs., a contributor to House- hold JFoi-ds, i. 85 Gendarmes,;i. 140, 141 Geometry in the training of an artist, i. 148 George IV., Libel by William Hone on, ii. 173 George BariiiveU, played at Brighton, ii. 107 Gilchrist, Dr., ii. 150 Giovanni in London, at the Lyceum Theatre, ii. 136 Goldsmith, Oliver, and the "Old Dog" Tavern, ii. 180 Gore House, taken bv Alexis Soyer, i. 12 Goya y Lucientes, Don Francisco, Etchings by, ii. 164—166 Graham, junior, James Lorimer, i. 222 Grant, General, his taciturnity, ii. 11 ; his knowledge of Mexico, Great Exhibition, of 1851, and the transformation of Gore House, i. 12 ; Sir Joseph Paxton's design for, 207, 208 Great Swallow Street, demolished for the construction of Regent Street, ii. 173 '^Greeks," Gamesters, ii. 90 — 92 Greeley, Horace, amongst the London Bohemians in Paris, i. 118, 215 ; renewal of author's acquaintance with, 220 " Greenbacks," Issue of, i. 229 " Greybacks," i. 237 Grimaldi, Joseph, ii. 113 Grisi, Madame, ii. 225 ; a benefit of hers at Her Majesty's Theatre, 263 Gruneisen, Mr., ii. 262 Guizot, M., apx3lies to the British Government for the restoration of the ashes of Napoleon I. to France, I i. 190 Gzci/ Mannering, Miss Genevieve Ward in, ii. 137 Gye, Frederick, Handwriting of, ii. 278, 279 Hackney coaches of 1839, i. 133, 134 Hall, Mr. Sydney, ii. 262 Hallswelle, Keely, i. 72 Handwriting : As an index of char- acter, ii. 268, 270 ; smallness of the author's, 269, 270; Charles Dickens's, 271, 272 ; Lord Brough- am's, 275, 276 ; Beresford Hope's, 276; Walter Thornbury's, 276; Thackeray's, 277 ; Douglas Jer- rold's, 277 ; Sir Arthur Helps', 278; Charles Reade's, 278; Fred- erick Gye's and Charles Godfrey Leland's, 279 Hannay, James, i. 22 Harlequin Billg Taglor, i. 100 ; played at the Princess's Theatre, ii. 120, 121 Harlequin a)id Friar Bacon at Covent Garden Theatre, ii. 113 Harlequin Hogarth, ii. 120 Harlequin King Henrg VIII., at Covent Garden Theatre, ii. 121, 122 Harley, John Pritt, i. 50, 54 ; in The Lord of the Manor, ii. 133, 134 HarjDer, the trumpet-player, ii. 130 Harris, Mr. Augustus, stage director at Covent Garden Theatre in 1856, ii. 121 Harris, Sir Augustus, ii. 121 Harrisse, Mr. Henry, i. 223 Hart, Mr. Ernest, i. 21 Havana, ii. 4 ; Opera House and cigar manufactory at, 15 Hawkers in Paris, i. 157, 158, 161, 162 Haymarket, The, Its condition during the days of the night-houses and now, ii. 96—98 Heart of MidlotJiian, at the Surrey Theatre, ii. 138 Helps, Sir Arthur, Handwriting of, ii. 278 Hemans, Mrs., Melancholy tone of her songs, ii. 153, 154 Higgins, Matthew, i. 31 288 THUSfOS AND PEOPLE. Highwaymen, Hauuts in Great Swallow Street of, ii. 173 Hogarth, Thackeray's opinion of, i. 24; author's proposed "Life" of, 25, 27 ; the author's papers in the Cornhill Magazine on, 28, 29 ; lodging at the "Old Elephant," ii. 177 ; his residence in Leicester Square, 232 Hogg, James, and the suppers at Ambrose's tavern, i. 83 Hollingshead, Mr. John, i. 21, 77 Holloway Prison, compared with Whitecross Street Prison, ii. 68 Holy Well, The, and the " Old Dog" Tavern, ii. 179, 180 Hone, William, His Political Cate- chism, and his oblique compliment to George IV., ii. 173 Hook, Theodore, and Crockford's, ii. 94 Hope, Mr. Beresford, i. 38 ; his hand- writing, ii. 276 Horne, Richard Henry, at the HoHseJiold Words dinners, i. 92 ; his "Orion" and other literary work, 93 Hotels, Old-fashioned and modern, i. 126, 127 ; at Washington, 255, 256 ; of Havana, ii. 14 Houghton, Lord, i. 30 Household Words, Author's con- tributions to, i. 19, 20, 67—74, 77 - 82 ; anonymity of its contributors, 80, 81 ; dinners to contributors to, 84, 85, 90—95 Howe, Mrs. Julia Ward, Her words for the tune of "John Brown," i. 247, 248 Hugo, Victor, and Charles Dickens, i. 128 Hullah, John, and the Village Coquettes^ i. 48, 49 Hungerford Market, Historical as- sociations of, ii. 234 ; its architec- ture and general arrangements, 235 ; disused as a market, 235 ; its attractions, 236 Hunt, Leigh, at the Household Words dinners, i. 90, 91 ; characteristics, 91 ; as a journalist, 92 Hurlburt, Mr. William Henry, i. 220 Imprisonment for debt under the writ of Capias ad satisfaciendum, ii. 53 ; illustrated in "Pickwick," 54, 55 Insolvency of gentlemen in difficul- [ ties, ii. 62 I Irving, Mr. Henry, ii. 1 Isclascihuatl, ii. 10 . Iturbide, ii. 28 ; his two sons, 28, 29 Ivanoff, M., ii. 225 Jerrold, Blanchard, i. 77; his "Life of Napoleon, III.," and other lit- erary work, 94 ; residence in Paris, and association with London Bo- hemians, 110; industry in Paris, 116 Jerrold, Douglas, i. 44; at Kilpack's Divan, 86 ; caricatured by the author, 87, 88 ; his advice to the author, 90 ; allusion to his "Pris- oner of War," 104 ; his handwrit- ing, ii. 277 " John Brown," Mrs. J. W. Howe's words for the tune of, i. 247, 248 "John Doe and Eichard Eoe," ii. 52, 53 Johnson, Andrew, Incident at inau- guration of, i. 263 Johnson, Captain Cecil, i. 252 Johnson, Mr. Godschall, i. 252 "Journey Due North," A, i. 102 Joyce, Q.C., Samuel, and Clifford's Inn, ii. 217 Juarez, President, ii. 6, 30, 31 Kean, Charles, takes the manage- ment of the Princess's Theatre, ii. 120 ; a humorous remark to his wife, 121 Keeley, Mrs., as " Oliver Twist," and as "Smike," i. 56; as "Jack Sheppard," 262 King's Bench Prison, Chancery pris- oners in, ii. 65 Kingsley, Charles, i. 29 Knight, Charles, at the Household Words dinners, i. 90 Knight, Rev. Joseph Philip, and " She wore a wreath of roses," ii. 150 " La Marseillaise," i. 150 INDEX, 289 **La Parisienne," Casimii* Dela- vigne's, i. 150 Lablache, M., ii. 225 Laffarge, Madame, her trial, i. 181 Lamb, Charles, his remark respecting John Braham, i. 48 Lamoriciere, General, ii. 31 Landseer, Sir Edwin, i. 31 Lara, Don Miguel de Mafiara Vicen- \ telo de, ii. 163 Layard, Sir A. H., i. 253 Le Fly, General, ii. 31, 32 Leal, Valdes, his " Dead Prelate," ii. 163, 164 Leboeuf, General, ii. 31 Leclercq, Miss Carlotta, as Colum- bine at the Princess's Theatre, ii. 120 Leech, John, i. 44, 59 Leighton, Sir Frederick, i. 30 Leighton, Mr. John, i. 14 Leland, Charles Godfrey, his hand- writing, ii. 279 Lemon, Mark, i. 44, 59 ; his geni- ality, 62 ; opinion of the author's sketches, 63 ; caricatm-ed by the author, 88 Lcs Pilules da Tnahle, at Franconi's Winter Circus, ii. 115 — 118 Lever, Charles, His allusions to money-lenders, ii. 38 Levy, Mr. Jonas, i. 21 Lewes, George H., i. 30 Limmer's Hotel, ii. 171 Lincoln, Abraham: Simplicity of his prandial arrangements, i. 254 ; proclamation of the abolition of slavery, 259 ; appearance and manner, 264 ; his dry humour, 265, 266 Linley, George, Melodies by, ii. 150, 151 Liston, in Rob Roy^ ii. 136 ; in Guy Manner ing^ 137 ; in The Anti- quary^ 138 Literary men. Money-lenders to, ii. 40 Lockhart, John Gibson, and ''Noctes Ambrosianae," i. 82, 83 Locock, Sir Charles, and the Old Beefsteak Club, ii. 214 Loftus, Lord Augustus, i. 253 London and Brighton Railway, Commencement and opening of, i. 199, 200 ; early carnages on the, 205—207 Long's Hotel, ii. 171 Lopes de Santa Anna, Don Antonio, His characteristics, and his attempt to enter Vera Cruz, ii. 19 — 21 Lord of the Manor, The, "Moll Fla- gon" in, ii. 132, 133 Louis, King of Holland, i. 183 Louis Napoleon, His "invasion" of Boulogne, i. 183—185; his subse- quent career, 185, 186 ; his parent- age, 183, 187 Louis Philippe, PoHcy of, i. 189, 191 Love in a yUlage, Aii's in, ii. 135 Lover, Samuel, VersatiUty of, ii. 151 Lyceum Theatre, The, Giovanni in London at, ii. 136; and the Old Beefsteak Club, 213 Lyons, Lord, i. 214 ; his tact and skill at Washington during the American War, 249, 250 ; his taci- turnity and his numerous de- spatches, 250 — 252 ; his good din- ners, 252, 253 Macdonald, Marshal, Funeral of, i. 182 Mackay, Charles, i. 34, 268 Macready, William Charles, i. 110 " Mad Marquis," The, ii. 80, 82, 84 ; at Marlborough Street Police Court, 85, 86 Maddox, Mr. John Med ex, His em- ployment the author at the Princess's Theatre, i. 6, 203 ; ii. 118 Madeleine, The, i. 159 Maginn, Dr. William, and the sup- pers at Ambrose's Tavern, i. 82, 83 Magnetic Needle Telegraph, i. 199 Malet, Sir Edward, i. 251 Malibran, ii. 145, 225 Man in the Moon, The, i. 61; ii. 233 Marble, Mr. Manton, Editor of the New York World, i. 220 Maria di Rohan at Covent Garden Theatre, ii. 123—127 Markets, The fascinations of, ii. 236 Marriage of Figaro, ii, 131 290 THINGS AND PEOPLE. Marriott, Frederick, ii. 181 Marshalsea Prison : Class of debtors confined there, ii. 63 Martin, John, Pictures by, ii. 166 — 168 Maximilian, Emperor, ii. 6 Maxwell, Mr. John, and Temple Bar, i. 33, 34 Mayhew, Augustus, i. Ill May hew, Henry, and his " London Labour and London Poor," i. Ill Mayhew, Horace, i. 44 Mayhew, Juhus, i. Ill Mexico : Souvenirs of a visit, ii. 1 — 4, 9 ; costume for horseback riding, 3 ; author's travelling outfit, 4, 5 ; brigands, 6, 7, 22 ; reminiscences awakened, 9, 10 ; and General Grant, 11 ; and the dangers of a voyage there during the American War, 12, 14 ; the palace at the capital, 25, 26 ; cathedral, sacri- ficial stone, and market of the capital, 27; hotels, 28; abstemious- ness amongst the upper classes of the city, 29 ; the national beverage, 29 ; condition prior to the ar- rival of Maximilian, 30 3fidas, Song for Apollo in, ii. 135 Millais, Sir John, i. 30 Mohocks, The, of Queen Anne's reign, ii. 71 Money-lenders : Their hardness and rapacity illustrated, ii. 33, 34 ; ex- aggerated ideas of their gains, 34, 35 ; Bacon's remark on their vocation, 35 ; their numbers diminished, 36 ; risks of "kite-flying," 36 ; affected by the legislation of 1869, 37 ; affected by abolition of purchase in the army, 37 ; old customs of lenders and borrowers, 38 ; at the West End, about Clare Market, and amongst French peasants, 39, 40; to literary men, 40; a "di- dactic " specimen, 41 ; the tactics of " Mr. Thorough," 42, 43 ; making l)resents of food to clients, 44 ; de- scription of " Mr. Quasimodo," and his breach of promise case, 44—47 ; "My Tommy's" hospitality and business practices, 47 — 50 Montholon, Marquis de, ii. 32 Morelos, The C^ra, ii. 25 Morland, "Dicky," i. 11 Mother Goose, and Joey Grimaldi, ii. 113 Mountain Sylph, John Barnett's, ii. 149 Muloch, Miss Dinah, a contributor to Household Words, i. 85 Murillo, and Valdes Leal's "Dead Prelate," ii. 163 Murphy, Mr. Commissioner, ii. 48 Music impressed upon the mind in infancy, ii. 143 Musical critics in 1836, Manners of, ii. 129 " My Tommy," His career as a bill- discounter, ii. 47 — 50 Napoleon I. : Parisian enthusiasm for liim in 1840, i. 187—189 ; in- terment of his remains in Paris in 1840, 192—195 Napoleon III. in Algeria, ii. 141 Nash, the architect. His construction of Regent Street, ii. 87, 173 Nassau, rendezvous for Confederate agents during the American War, i. 235 New York : Voyage from England thirty years ago, i. 213 ; lavish ex- penditure on entertainments during the war, 227—230 Nicholas, Emperor, and the parody, " The Low-bred Czar," ii. 152 " Nickleby," Banquets given by, ii. 48 ; illustrations of fast Hfe in, 74, 75 "Night-houses," ii. 96 Nightingale, Florence : Dickens's appreciation of her work, i. 125 " Noctes Ambrosiana3," Origin of, i. 82, 83 Norte, Description of a, ii. 16 North, Christopher, and the suppers at Ambrose's Tavern, i. 82, 83 Norton, The Hon. Caroline, ii. 145 O'Connell, Morgan John, i. 21 O'Dowd, Mr. J. H., i. 220 Old Bailey Court, A dinner at the, ii. 211—213 Old Beefsteak Club, ii. 175 ; a dinner at the, 213—216 INDEX. 291 Old Dog" Tavern, The : Its anti- quity, ii. 178, 179 ; Pepys' allu- sion, 178 ; allusion by Timbs, 179 ; and the Holy Well, 179 ; excava- tion of the supposed well, 179, 180 ; its appearance, 183 ; its accommodation, 184, 185 Omelettes, Inability of British people to make, ii. 227 Operas of past years : Maria di Mohan, ii. 123—127; Village Coquettes, 127 ; Artaxerxes, 128 — 130 ; Marriage of Figaro, 131 ; The Lord of the Manor, 132 ; The Quaker, 134 ; Love in a Village, 135 ; Midas, 135 ; Giovanni in London, 136; Rob Roy, 136; Guy Mamiering , 137 ; The Antiquary , 138; The Heart of Midlothian, 138; the Bomino Noir, 148; the Pre aux Clercs, 148 ; the Anibassa- drice, 148 ; the Fostillon de Long- jnmeau, 148 ; ^iege of Rochelle, 149 ; The Mountain Sylph, 149 Orizaba, Peak of, ii. 9 Orleans, Duchess of, i. 172 Osborne, Lord Sidney Godolphin, i. 29 Paganini, ii. 145 Pagliano's Hotel, ii. 231 Palmerston, Lord, and M. Guizot's , application for the restoration of the ashes of Napoleon I. to France, i. 190 ; 214 Pantomimes : The author's first experiences of them, ii. 106—111 ; tricks in former days, 109 — 111 ; remarks of a critic of 1835, 111, 112 ; their degeneracy complained of, 113 ; at Covent Garden, 113, 121 ; at Drury Lane, 114 ; in Paris, 115 — 118; at the Princess's Theatre, 118 Panton Street, Night-houses of, ii. 98—102 Paris : Dickens's frequent trips, i. 97 ; English Bohemians, 109, 110—123; Dickens's domicile, 124 ; restaur- ants, 130 ; theatres, 131, 132 ; journey from Boulogne by dili- gence, 145—154; its condition in 1667, 155, 156 ; its streets in 1839, 156—163; street cries, 157, 158; hawkers, 157, 158, 161, 162; the Madeleine, 159 ; the Rue Roy ale, 159, 160; Place de la Concorde, 160 ; the Champs Elysees, 160, 161 ; Pare Monceau, 163 ; a peaceful Major - General, 165; schoolboy life, 166, 174, 177—180 ; a dis- tribution of school prizes, 166, 167; memories of the Reign of Terror, 169, 170 ; wearing of whiskers and moustaches, 170, 171 ; the Duchess of Orleans, 172 ; the Prince Imperial,^ 173 ; Anglophobia, 173 — 175 ; Ecole de Natation, 179, 180 ; trial of Madame Laffarge, 181 ; funeral of Marshal Mac- donald, 182 ;' trial of Louis Napoleon, 185 ; enthusiasm about Napoleon 1. 187, 188, 189; policy of Louis PhiHppe, 189—191 ; second funeral of Napoleon L, 192 — 195 ; pantomimes, ii. 115 — 118 Parody, by Robert Brough, on "The Low-backed Car," ii. 152 Pany , Junior, Mr. John, His engage- ment at St. James's Theatre, i. 47, 48, 50 Passports, Examination at Boulogne of, i. 142 Paxton, Sir Joseph, and his plans for the Great Exhibition, i. 208, 209 Payn, Mr. James, i. 77 ; con- tributor to Household Words, 94 Pelissier, General, ii. 31 Pepys, Samuel, and the condition of Paris in 1667, i. 155 Persiani, ii. 225 Pestalozzian academy. Diet of boys in a, ii. 194—198 "Piccadilly Saloon," The, ii. 97, 98 Pictures of the past: Impressions made by them, ii. 155, 156; "Jack Sheppard," 156 — 159 ; master- pieces, 160 ; a portrait by Guido Reni, 160—162; by Spanish masters, 162 — 165; the "Dead Prelate," 163, 164; "Los De- sastres de la Guerra, 164 — 165 ; Goya's picture on the "Inquisi- tion," 166 ; Martin's "Eve of the Deluge," "Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still," "Bel- 292 THINGS AND PEOPLE. shazzar's Feast," aud the " Fall of Babylon," 167; Turner's " Kain, Steam, and Speed," "Jessica at the Window," the " Slave Ship," the "Old Tetneraire,^^ and "Venice — going to the Ball," and " Eeturning from the Ball," 169; Clarkson Stanfield's seashore scene in ^^cis and Galatea, and William Beverly's scene in The Night Dancers, 169, 170 "Pickwick," Allusion to the opera- tion of the writ oi Capias ad satis- faciendum in, ii. 54, 55 ; the Chancery prisoner in, 65 Pitt, Wm., and the forged assignats, i. 229 PoHcemen, of 1839, i. 136 ; and the night-houses, ii. 101, 102 Pond, Christopher, ii. 204 Popocatapetl, ii. 10, 11 Potato, The, the curse of the English cuisine, ii. 220 ; its popularity and its denunciation by Cobbett, 220 Potter's Coffee House, Its library, i. 7 ; its proprietor, 8 Prince Imperial, The, i. 173 Princess's Theatre, The : i. 5 ; a pantomime in 1846, ii. 118, 119; Harlequin Billy Taylor at, 120, 121 ; under Charles Kean's management, 120, 121 Prior, Mr. Melton, ii. 262 Procter, Miss Adelaide, a 4;ontributor to Household Words, i. 85 Pullman's carriage building works, i. 238 Pulque, ii. 29 Punch, and Mark Lemon, i. 59, 62, 63 ; parody of frontispiece by the author, 88, 89 " Punch and Judy," ii. 109 Puritanism, Influence on American Federal army of, i. 247 ; reaction against it during the Bestoration, ii. 71 Quaker, The, Airs in, ii. 134, 135 "Quasimodo," Mr., money-lender. His appearance and his breach of promise case, ii. 44 — 47 Queen's Messengers between America and England, i. 252 Railway, London and Brighton, Commencement and opening of, i. 199, 200 ; early carriages on the, 205—207 Railway mania of 1845, and the labours of draughtsmen, i. 204, 205 Railways : Signalmen of 1839, i. 197, 198 ; electric telegraph on, 199 ; Parliamentary trains on, 206 ; early carriages on, 205—207 ; the smoking- carriage innovation on, 207 ; in America, 230—234 Rainforth, Miss, in Artaxerxes, ii. 128 Ranelagh, Lord, and the Spanish cloak, ii. 262 Raymond, Henry, Editor of New I'ork 'Times, i. 220 Reach, Angus B., i. 20; and the Man in the 3Ioon, 64 Reade, Charles, Handwriting of, ii. 278 Reform Club, i. 34, 35 Regent Street, as originally built by Nash, ii. 87 ; buildings demolished for the construction of, 173 Reign of Terror, Memories of the. i. 109, 170 Reni, Guido, A portrait by, ii. 160 — 162 Reunion Club, i. 21 Riggs and Corcoran, Banking firm of > i. 256 Pob Roy, at Covent Garden Theatre, ii. 136 Romance of a waistcoat, ii. 264, 265 Romer, Miss, prima donna, ii. 128 Rossini, and Sir Henry Bishop's name, ii. 140 Rowdyism fifty years ago, ii. 73 Rubini, M., ii. 225 Russell, Admiral, i. 86 Russell, William Howard, i. 38 ; his letters to the Times from the Crimea, 125 ; in America, 268 Russian song to the music of the balalaika, ii. 141, 142 Sacrificios, ii. 16 St. Albans, Duchess of, ii. 145 St. Clair, Mr., in Guy Jfannering^ ii. 137 INDEX. 293 St. Denis, i. 153 St. James's Theatre, Engagements of author's mother and Mr. John Parry at, i. 47, 48 St. Thomas, ii. 19, 21 Sanitary Commission during Ameri- can War, i. 244 Santsbury, Mr. George, ii. 134 Sargent, Mr. G. r.,ii. 262 ISaturday Jtteview, Its treatment of the author, i 38 Scheff er, Ary, His portrait of Charles Dickens, i. 132 Schoolboy life in Paris, i. 166, 174, 177—180; ii. 191—194 Seacole, Mrs., ii. 24 Secesh " officers, i. 236 Semaphore on the roof of the Ad- miralty, i. 201 Serjeants' Inn, and processes against debtors, ii. 66 Seville, Pictures in the Church of La Caridad at, ii. 163 Seward, Mr., Nephew of W. H. Seward, i. 267 Seward, William H., i. 215, 254; characteristics, 266, 267 ; his opinion of the English Press, 267, 268 Seymour, Captain Conway, i. 252 Sheffield, Mr., Secretary to Lord Lyons at Washington, i. 251 Sheppard, Jack, Portrait in Wash- ington of, i. 261, 262; ii. 158, 159; and a face on the Kiviera, 156, 157 Sherretf, Miss, Frima donna, ii. 128 Sieffe of Uochelle, Balfe's, ii. 149 Signalling, Railway, Fust system of, 1. 197, 198 Sikes, Mr., Designer of the cover of CornhiU Magazine, i. 28, 31 Simpson, Mr. William, ii. 262 Slavery, Its abolition in British Colonies, i. 137, 217 Sleeping-cars, in America, i. 230, 231, 238 ; theii* originators, 238, 239 Smith, Albert : Takes the author to the Fielding Club, i. 20 ; and the CornhiU Magazine, 29 ; and the Man in the Moon, 64 ; ii. 233 ; his Great Hotel Nuisance," i. 126 Smith, Mr. George, i. 25, 27 ; his payments for contributions to the Corn hill Magazine, 29 Smith, John Thomas, Author of "A Book for a Rainy Day," ii., 234 Smith, Miss Julia, in Artaxerxes, ii. 128, 129 Smuggling in America during the war, i. 236 Songs of the Past: The " Yemstchick Song," ii. 142; '^The Evening Gun," 144; ''TheBay of Dublin," 145; Entreat me not to leave thee," 145; "Lascia ch'iopiango," 145 ; "So Miss Myrtle is going to Marry," 145; Les Com- pliments de Normandie,'''' 146 ; " rAnge JJechu,'' 147, 148 ; " La Farisienne,'' 147; the " Magic - wove Scarf," 150 ; " She wore a wreath of roses," 150; ''Con- stance," "The Spirit of Love," and Kathleen Ma vourneen," 151 ; "RoryO'More," 151; "The Four- leaved Shamrock," 152; "The Low-backed Car," 152 ; "Through the Wood," " I'd be a butterfly," "Oh, give me back my Ai-ab steed," "Burial in the Desert," and the " Pilgrim Fathers," 153 Soyer, Alexis, turns Gore House into a restaurant, i. 12; and Thack- eray, 15 ; his journey to Scutari and Balaclava, 101 ; ii. 248 ; his otfer to the author, i. 102; and alamode beef, ii. 203 ; his dress, and an introduction to him in Hunger- ford Market, 240—242 ; leaves the Reform Club, 242 ; his books on cookery, 242, 243 ; his apartments in Soho, 243, 244 ; his wife,^ and her monument in Kensal Green Cemetery, 244, 245 ; his miniature kitchen and larder, 246 ; his char- acter, 247 ; lectures at United Service Institution, 248 " Soyer' s Symposium," i. 12; Thack- eray's visit to, 13 — 17 Spain, The British Legion in, ii. 91, 260 Spaniards,Pseudo-, in London, ii. 261 Spanish peasant song, ii. 142 " Spread- Eagling " in the Federal army, i. 24o 294 THINGS AND PEOPLE. ^'Spunging houses : " Described by Dickens and Thackeray, ii. 58 ; in Cursitor Street and Bream's Build- ings, 58 ; habits of inmates, 59 ; and the pathetic scenes witnessed, 60 ; and ' ' copper captains, " 60 ; their private apartments, 61 ; off ! the Blackfriars Road, 63 Spurs of Mexico, ii. 3, 4 Stanfield, Clarkson, i. 110 ; his pic- ture of a scene in Acis a/ul Gcdatea ii. 170 Staunton, Mr., i. 254 Steamboat travelhng in America, i. 239—241 Stephen, Mr. Leslie, and Thackeray, Stephens, Miss, in Bob ii. 136 ; in Gay ]\[attnerlng, 137 ; in the A)itiquanj, 138 Stephenson, Eobert, and Sir Joseph Paxton's plans for the Great Exhibition building, i. 208, 209 . Sterry, Mr. Ashby, and the versatility of Samuel Lover, ii. 151 Stranger, The, ii. 108 Street-cries in Paris, i. 157, 158 Sullivan, Bany, i. 93 Sumner, Charles, at a dinner at Thackeray's, i. 36, 37 ; his manner, and his eloquence as a senator, 258, 259 Swan Tavern, Hungerford Market, Eccentric people at the, ii. 237 — 239 Swearing, Habit of, in London, i. 135, 136; in France, 139 Taglioni, Maria, ii. 225, 226 Tambuiini, M., ii. 225 Taverns of the i^ast : Their transfor- mations of to-day, ii. 172 ; the ''Monster," "Elephant and Cas- tle," "Swiss Cottage," "Eyre Anns," " Sol's Aitqs," "Angel," "Mother Redcap," 172; work of demoHtion bv Xash, 173 ; causes of demoHtion, 174; "Old White Hart," 175, 176; "Thatched House, ' ' ' ' Angel ' ' (Sti'and) , "Crown and Anchor," "London Tavern," " Clarendon " (Bond Street), "Old Elephant," 176, 177; "Old Dog," 178, 180, 183, 184—187; "Old Betty's Chop House," 179; the old "Hum- mums," "Rainbow," and the "Cock," 187; "Peele's Coffee House," 188; "Blue Posts," 188; " Swan," Hungerford Market, 236 Tawell, the murderer, and the elec- tric telegraph, i. 199 Taylor, Bayard, i. 222 Taylor, Sir Charles, i. 30 ; at a Corn- hUl dinner, 33 Tea, Former prices of, ii. 224 Teetotalism in the Federal army of America, i. 243 Telegraph, Electric, on the Great Western Railway, i. 199 Telegraph, Magnetic Xeedle, i. 199 Telegraph, Wheatstone's Alpha- betical, i. 199 Temple Bar, Its commencement, i. 34 _ Tenniel, Sii' John, i. 41 Tenostitlan, ii. 10 Terry, Kate, ]\Iiss, in a pantomime at the Princess's Theatre, ii. 120 Thackeray, William Makepeace : As drawn by Anthony Trollope, i. 2 ; and Charles Dickens, 3 ; the most competent person to write his hfe, 3 ; and Mr. Edmund Yates 3—5 ; his pseudonjTns in Fraser^s 2£aga- zlue, 9 ; at the Deaner}^ Club, 11 ; at " Soyer's Sj^mposium," 13 — 17 ; his remark to the ' ' Professor ' ' at Gore House, 17 ; his lectuiing tour in the L^nited States, 18 ; and Dr. Bellows, 18 ; meetmg with the author at the Fielding Club, 22, 23 ; his 023inion of Hogarth, 24 ; as a conversationahst, 25, 75 ; his vary- ing moods, 26 ; commences Corn- hill Magazine, 28; as a lecturer, 31, 32 ; as an after-dinner speaker, 32, 33 ; proposes the author as a member of the Reform Club, 34, 35 ; removal to Kensington, 36 ; sees Xapoleon at St. Helena, 38 ; his jocular suggestion at a dinner at Greenwich, 39 ; his death, 39 ; characteristics, 40 — 44 ; his extrac- tion, 43 ; his associates on the Vanch staff, 44 ; partiaUty for INDEX, 295 patrician acquaintances, 44 ; myths regarding his individuahty, 46 ; his use of foreign words and expres- sions, 103 ; his description of the second funeral of Napoleon, 193 ; his ideal flunkey, ii. 76 Thistlewood, Arthur, ruined by gambling, ii, 93, 94 Thomas, Mr. W. Moy, i. 77, 94 Thornbury, Walter, i. 77, 94; his handwriting, ii. 276, 277 Thornhill, Sir James, and the por- trait of Jack Sheppard, i. 262 ; ii. 157 Thornton, Sir Edward, i. 253 "Thorough, Mr.," money-lender, ii. 42—44 Thurtell, Jack, and his victim, Weare, ii. 92, 93 Tickler, Mr., and the suppers at Am- brose's Tavern, i. 82 Tierra CaHente, Vegetation of, ii. 9, 10 Timbs, John, allusion to the "Old Dog " Tavern, and the Holy Well, ii. 179 Tom Tliumh the Great at the St. James's Theatre, ii. 133, 134 Tomlins, Frederick Guest, i. 21 "Trapbois," The, ii. 38 Tree, Miss Maria in Clari^ the Maid of Milan, ii. 137 Tr^f?z^aifair, The, i. 212 Trollope, Anthony, His portraiture of Thackeray, i. 2 ; some of his cha- racteristics, 30 Turner's pictures, ii. 168, 169 Turnham Green, Diet of boys in an academy at, ii. 194 — 198 Une Telle, Madame, Gambling In- ferno kept by, ii. 87—89 Yanderbilt, Commodore, i. 223 Ventimiglia, Custom House at, ii. 156 Vera Cruz, ii. 4, 15 ; a Norte off, 16; its people, streets, and unsanitary condition, 17 ; French and Egyp- tian troops at, 16, 18 Vernet, Horace, His illustrations of the " Life " of Napoleon I., by M. Laurent de I'Ardeche, i. 189 Verrey's Restaurant, ii. 229, 230 Vestris, Madame, in Marriage of Figaro, ii. 131 ; as Don Giovanni, 136 Victoria, Queen, Her influence on the morals of the West-End, ii. 94 Village Coquettes, ii. 127 Villages in France, i. 148 Villiers, Mr. Frederick, ii. 262 Vivian, Lord, i. 2^3 Waistcoat, A romance of a, ii. 264, 265 Walford, Mr., Allusion to the " Old Dog " Tavern, and the Holy Well, ii. 179 Walker, Frederick, i. 31 Ward, Miss Genevieve, at Havana, ii. 15 ; in Guy Mannering , 137 Warner, Mrs., in IXoh Bog, ii. 137 Warren, Samuel, allusion to his " Ten Thousand a Year," ii. 38 Washington : Festal aspect during the war, i. 230 ; ability and hospi- tality of Lord Lyons as British Minister, 249—253 ; hospitality at the White House, 253, 254; hotels, 255, 256 ; eloquent speech by Mr. Sumner, 259 ; the Capitol, 263 West, Mrs. W., in lioh Roy, ii. 137 " Whipping Toms," The, of Charles II. 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Each containing about Sixty Pages of Pictures and Stories, &c. 6d. each. Little Talks. Bright Stars. Nursery Toys. Pet's Posy. Tiny Tales. Daisy's Story Book. I Dot's Story Book. A Nest of Stories. Good-Night Stories. Chats for Small Chatterers. | Auntie's Stories. Birdie's Story Book. Little Chimes. A Sheaf of Tales. Dewdrop Stories. Cassell's Sixpenny Story Books. All Illustrated, and containing Interesting Stories by well-known writers. The Boat Club. Little Pickles. The Smuggler's Cave. Little Lizzie. Little Bird, Life and Adven- tures of. Luke Barnicott. The Elchester College Boys. My First Cruise. The Little Peacemaker; The Delft Jug. Cassell's Shilling Story Books. All Illustrated, and containing Interest- ing Stories. Buiity and the Boys. The Heir of Elmdale. The Mystery at ShoncUff School. Claimed at Last, and Boy's Reward. Thorns a,nd Tangles. The Cuckoo in the Robin's Nest. John's Mistake. The History of Five Little Pitchers. Diamonds in the Sand. Illustrated Books for the Little On All Illustrated, is. each ; cloth Tales Told for Sunday. Sunday Stories for Small People. Stories and Pictures for Sun- day. Bible Pictures for Boys and Girls. Firelight Stories. Sunlight and Shade. Rub-a-Dub Tales. Fine Feathers and Fluffy Fur. Scrambles and Scrapes. Tittle Tattle Tales. Up and Down the Garden. Surly Bob. The Giant's Cradle. Shag and Doll. Aunt Lucia's Locket. The Magic Mirror. The Cost of Revenge. Clever Frank. Among the Redskins. The Ferryman of Brill. Harry Maxwell. A Banished Monarch. Seventeen Cats. es. Containing interesting Stories, gilt, IS. 6d. All Soi'ts of Adventures. Our Sunday Stories. Our Holiday Hours. Indoors and Out. Some Farm Friends. Wandering Ways. Dumb Friends. Those Golden Sands. Little Mothers and their Children. Our Pretty Pets. Our Schoolday Hours. Creatures Tame. Creatures Wild. Selections from Cassell ^ Co7npany^5 Publications, Wanted— a King " Series. Cheap Edition. Illustrated. 2S. 6d. each. 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The Hunters of the Ozark. | The Camp in the Mountains. The Last War Trail. The "Log Cabin" Series. By Edward S. Ellis. With Four Full- page Illustrations in each. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. each. The Lost Trail. | Camp-Fire and Wigwam. 1 Footprints in the Forest. The "Great River" Series. By Edward S. Ellis. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth, bevelled boards, 2S. 6d. each. Down the Mississippi. | Lost in the Wilds. Up the Tapajos; or. Adventures in Brazil. The *' Boy Pioneer"^ Series. By Edward S. Ellis. With Four Full- page Illustrations in each Book. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. each. Ned in the Woods. A Tale of | Ned on the Biver. A Tale of Indian Early Days in the West. | River Warfare. Ned in the Block House. A Story of Pioneer Life in Kentucky. The "World in Pictures." Illustrated throughout. 2s. 6d. each. A Hamble Bound France. All the Bussias. Chats about Germany. The iSastern Wonderland (Japan). Half-Crown Story Books. Margaret's Enemy. Pen's Pex-plexities. Glimpses of South America. Bound Alrica. The Land of Temples (India). The Isles of the Pacific. Peeps into China Notable Shipwrecks, At the South Pole. Books for the Little Ones. Bhymes for the Young Folk. By William Allingham. Beautifully Illustrated. 3s. 6d. The History Scrap Book; With nearly 1,000 Engravings; Cloth, 7s. 6d. My Diary. With 12 Coloured Plates and 366 AVoodcuts. Is. The Sunday Scrap Book. With Several Hundred Illustrations. Paper boards, 3s. 6d. ; cloth, gilt edges, 5s. The Old Fairy Tales. With Orij^inal Illustrations. Boards, Is.: cloth. Is. 6d. Albums for Children. 3s. 6d. each. The Album for Home, School, and Play. Containing Stories by Popular Authors. Jllustrated, My Own Album of Animals. With Full-page Illustrations. Picture Album of All Sorts. With Full-page Illustrations. The Chit-Chat Album. lUustrated throughout Cassell & Company's Complete Catalogue will be sent post free on application to CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited, Ludgate Hill, London.