Part 7

I think the Euston Square Terminus is, for its purpose, the handsomest building I have ever seen, and I have seen a few railway stations. There is nothing to compare to it in Paris, where the termini are garish, stuccoed, flimsy-looking structures, half booths and half barracks. Not Brussels, not Berlin, not Vienna, can show so stately a structure, for a railway station, _bien entendu_; and it is only, perhaps, in St. Petersburg, which seems to have been built with a direct reference to the assumption of the Imperial crown at some future period by the King of Brobdignag, that a building can be found—the Moscow Railway Terminus, in fact—to equal in grandeur of appearance our columniated palace of the iron road. But the Russian station, like all else in that “Empire of Façades,” is deceptive: a magnificent delusion, a vast and splendid sham. Of seeming marble without it is; within, but bad bricks and lath and plaster.

[Illustration: PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: PLATFORM OF THE LONDON AND NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY.]

_Open sesame!_ Let us pass the crowds of railway porters, who have not much to do just now, and are inclined to lounge about with their hands in their pockets, and to lean—in attitudes reminding the spectator of the Grecian statues clad in green velveteen, and with white letters on their collars—on their luggage trucks, for the passengers by the seven o’clock train are not much addicted to arriving in cabs or carriages which require to be unloaded, and there are very few shilling or sixpenny gratuities to be earned by the porters, for the securing of a comfortable corner seat with your back to the engine, or that inestimable comfort, a place in a first-class carriage whose door the guard is good enough to keep locked, and in which you can make yourself quite at home with a bottle of sherry, some walnuts, and a quiet game at _écarté_ or _vingt un_. The seven o’clock trainbands are not exactly of the class who drink sherry and play cards; they are more given to selling walnuts than to eating them. They are, for the most part, hard-faced, hard-handed, poorly-clad creatures; men in patched, time-worn garments; women in pinched bonnets and coarse shawls, carrying a plenitude of baskets and bundles, but very slightly troubled with trunks or portmanteaus. You might count a hundred heads and not one hat-box; of two hundred crowding round the pay-place to purchase their third-class tickets for Manchester, or Liverpool, or even further north, you would have to look and look again, and perhaps vainly after all, for the possessor of a railway rug, or even an extra overcoat. Umbrellas, indeed, are somewhat plentiful; but they are not the slim, aristocratic trifles with ivory handles and varnished covers—enchanter’s wands to ward off the spells of St. Swithin, which moustached dandies daintily insert between the roof and the hat-straps of first-class carriages. Third-class umbrellas are dubious in colour, frequently patched, bulgy in the body, broken in the ribs, and much given to absence from the nozzle. Swarming about the pay-place, which their parents are anxiously investing, thirteen-and-fourpence or sixteen-and-ninepence in hand, are crowds of third-class children. I am constrained to acknowledge that the majority of these juvenile travellers cannot be called handsome children, well-dressed children, even tolerably good-looking children. Poor little wan faces you see here, overshadowed by mis-shapen caps, and bonnets nine bauble square; poor little thin hands, feebly clutching the scant gowns of their mothers; weazened little bodies, shrunken little limbs, distorted often by early hardship, by the penury which pounced on them—not in their cradles—they never had any—but in the baker’s jacket in which they were wrapped when they were born, and which will keep by them, their only faithful friend, until they die, and are buried by the parish—poor ailing little children are these, and among them who shall tell how many hungry little bellies! Ah! judges of Amontillado sherry; crushers of walnuts with silver nut-crackers; connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow seal; gay riders in padded chariots; proud cavaliers of blood-horses, you don’t know how painfully and slowly, almost agonisingly, the poor have to scrape, and save, and deny themselves the necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare. It is a long way to Liverpool, a long way to Manchester; the only passengers by the seven o’clock train who can afford to treat the distance jauntily, are the Irish paupers, who are in process of being passed to their parish, and who will travel free. O! marvels of eleemosynary locomotion from Euston Square to Ballyragget or Carrighmadhioul!

But hark! the train bell rings; there is a rush, and a trampling of feet, and in a few seconds the vast hall is almost deserted. This spectacle has made me somewhat melancholy, and I think, after all, that I will patronise the nine o’clock express instead of the PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN.

Let us follow the crowd of third-class passengers on to the vast platform. There the train awaits them, puffing, and snorting, and champing its adamantine bit, like some great iron horse of Troy suddenly gifted with life and power of locomotion. By the way, I wonder how that same wooden horse we are supposed to read about in Homer, but study far more frequently in the pages of Lemprière, or in the agreeable metrical romance of Mr. Alexander Pope, really effected its entrance into Ilium. Was it propelled on castors, on rollers, or on those humble wooden wheels that quickened the march of the toy horse of our nonage—the ligneous charger from Mr. Farley’s shop in Fleet Street, painted bright cream-colour, with spots resembling red wafers stuck all over him, a perpendicular mane, and a bushy tail? Very few first or even second-class carriages are attached to the great morning train. The rare exceptions seem to be placed there more as a graceful concession to the gentilities, or the respectabilities, or the “gigabilities,” as Mr. Carlyle would call them, than with any reference to their real utility in a journey to the north. Who, indeed, among the bustling Anglo-Saxons, almost breathless in their eagerness to travel the longest possible distance in the shortest possible time, would care to pay first-class fare for a trip to Manchester, which consumes ten mortal hours, when, by the space-scorning express, the distance may be accomplished, at a not unreasonable augmentation of fare, in something like five hours? So the roomy six-seated chariots, with their arm-rests and head-rests, are well nigh abandoned; and the wooden boxes, which appear to have been specially designed by railway directors to teach second-class travellers, who can afford to pay more than third-class fare, that they had much better pay first-class, and go the entire animal (which, indeed, seeing how abominable are our second-class carriages in England, is a far preferable proceeding), are not much better tenanted. Some misanthropic men, in Welsh wigs and fur caps with flaps turned down over the ears, peer at us as we pass, pull up the window-frames captiously, as though they suspected us of a design to intrude on their solitude, and, watch in hand, call out in hoarse voices to the guard to warn him it is time the train had started. What is the use of being in a hurry, gentlemen? you will have plenty of breathing-time at Tring, and Watford, and Weedon, and some five-and-twenty other stations, besides opportunities for observing the beauties of nature at remote localities, where you will be quietly shunted off on to a siding to allow the express to pass you by.

But what a contrast to the quietude of the scarcely-patronised first and second-class _wagons_ are the great hearse-like caravans in which travel the teeming hundreds who can afford to pay but a penny a mile! Enter one of these human menageries where the occupants are stowed away with little more courtesy or regard to their comfort than might be exemplified by the master of the ceremonies of one of Mr. Wombwell’s vans. What a hurly-burly; what a seething mass; what a scrambling for places; what a shrill turmoil of women’s voices and children’s wailings, relieved, as in the _Gospodin Pomilaïou_ (the Kyrie Eleison of the Russian churches), by the deep bass voices of gruff men! What a motley assemblage of men, women, and children, belonging to callings multifariously varied, yet all marked with the homogeneous penny-a-mile stamp of poverty! Sailors with bronzed faces and tarry hands, and those marvellous tarpaulin pancake hats, stuck, in defiance of all the laws of gravity, at the back of their heads; squat, squarely-built fellows, using strange and occasionally not very polite language, much given to “skylarking” with one another, but full of a simple, manly courtesy to all the females, and marvellously kind to the babies and little children; gaunt American sailors in red worsted shirts, with case-knives suspended to their belts, taciturn men expectorating freely, and when they do condescend to address themselves to speech, using the most astounding combination of adjective adjurations, relating chiefly to their limbs and their organs of vision; railway navvies going to work at some place down the line, and obligingly franked thither for that purpose by the company; pretty servant-maids going to see their relatives; Jew pedlars; Irish labourers in swarms; soldiers on furlough, with the breast of their scarlet coatees open, and disclosing beneath linen of an elaborate coarseness of texture—one might fancy so many military penitents wearing hair tunics; other soldiers in full uniform, with their knapsacks laid across their knees, and their muskets—prudently divested of the transfixing bayonets—which the old women in the carriage are marvellously afraid will “go off,” disposed beside them, proceeding to Weedon barracks under the command of a staid Scotch corporal, who reads a tract, “Grace for Grenadiers” or “Powder and Piety,” and takes snuff; journeymen mechanics with their tool-baskets; charwomen, servants out of place, stablemen, bricklayers’ labourers, and shopboys.

[Illustration: PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: INTERIOR OF A THIRD CLASS CARRIAGE.]

Ay, and there are, I am afraid, not a few bad characters among the crowd: certain dubiously-attired, flash-looking, ragged dandies, with cheap pins in their foul cravats, and long greasy hair floating over their coat-collars, impress me most unfavourably, and dispose me to augur ill for the benefit which Manchester or Liverpool may derive from their visit; and of the moral status of yonder low-browed, bull-necked, villanous-looking gentleman, who has taken a seat in a remote corner, between two stern guardians, and who, strive as he may to pull his coat-cuffs over his wrists, cannot conceal the presence of a pair of neat shining handcuffs, there cannot, I perpend, exist any reasonable doubt. But we must take the evil with the good: and we cannot expect perfection, not even in a Parliamentary Train.

EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.—ST. JAMES’S PARK—THE MALL.

Of the great army of sightseers, there are few but have paid a visit to Portsmouth, and, under the guidance of a mahogany-faced man in a pea-jacket, who has invariably served in his youth as coxswain to Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B., have perambulated from stem to stern, from quarterdeck to kelson, that famous ship from whose signal halyards flew out, fifty-three years since, the immortal watchword “England expects every man to do his duty,” in Trafalgar Bay. We are (or rather were, till the epoch of the late passport regulations and the war), an ambitious army of sightseers in this year of questionable grace, ’59; and nothing less would serve us then for an autumn trip than a picnic in the Street of Tombs at Pompeii, a moonlight polka among the rank docks and charlocks and slimy reptiles of the Roman Colosseum, a yacht voyage up the gulf of Bothnia, or a four days’ jolting in a _telega_ from Moscow to the fair of Nishni-Novgorod. But in the days of yore, when this old hat was new, and Manlius was consul, and the eleven hours’ route to the Continent existed not, we went a-gipsying in a less ostentatious manner. The Lions in the Tower, the Horns at Highgate, the Spaniards at Hampstead, the Wandering Minstrel at Beulah Spa; and on highdays and holidays a stage-coach and pleasure-boat journey to Portsmouth, Southampton, Netley Abbey, Carisbrook Castle, and the Undercliff; these filled up the simple measure of our pleasure-gadding. We are improved now-a-days, and go the grand tour like my lord; and are wiser, and better, and happier—of course.

When in the noble harbour of Portsmouth you have taken your wife, your sweetheart, or your friend the intelligent foreigner, to whom you wish to show the glories of England, and when the cicerone of the great war-ship has told his parrot-tale about admirals’ quarter-galleries and officers’ gun-rooms; when at last he has taken you into the cabin, and at the back shown you the sorrowful inscription painted on the stanchion, “HERE NELSON DIED!” did never a sudden desire come across you to be left alone—to have the army of sight-seers banished five hundred miles away—to be allowed to remain there in the silent cabin among the shadows, to muse on the memory of the great dead, to conjure up mind-pictures of that closing scene: the cannon booming overhead; the terrified surgeons with outspread bandages, and probes, and knives, knowing that their skill was of no avail; the burly shipmen crying like little children; and alone tranquil and serene among that sorrowful group, peaceful as an infant in its cradle, the Admiral, his stars and ribbons gleaming in the lantern’s fitful rays, but never with so strong a light as the gory ghastliness of his death wound; the brave yellow-haired Admiral, with the puny limbs and giant’s heart, waiting to die, ready to die, happy to die, thanking God that he had done his duty to his king, and meekly saying, “Kiss me, Hardy.”

That inscription in the _Victory’s_ cabin has been to me the source of meditation frequent and infinitely pleasant. I love to think, walking in historical streets and houses, that my feet are treading over spots where men for ever famous have left an imprint of glory. I peer into the soil, the stones, the planks, to descry the shadowy mark of Hercules’ foot, of the iron-plated sole of the warrior, the sandalled shoon of the saint, the dainty heel of the brocaded slipper of beauty. Every place that history or tradition has made her own is to me a field, not of forty, but of forty thousand footsteps; and I please myself sometimes with futile wishes that the boundaries of these footsteps might have been marked by plates of brass and adamant, as Nelson’s death-place is marked on board his flagship. It were better, perhaps, to leave the exact spot to imagination; for though I would give something to know the very window of the Banqueting House from whence Charles Stuart came out to his death, and the precise spot where he turned to Juxon and uttered his mysterious injunction “Remember!” I would not care to know the particular branch of the tree to which Judas affixed his thrice-earned halter when he hanged himself: I could spare Mr. Dix the trouble of telling me the identical spot on the tavern table on which the coroner laid his three-cornered hat when he held his inquest on the worthless impostor Chatterton—a “marvellous boy” if you will, but one who perished in his miserable folly and forgery—and I could well exempt the legitimacy-bemused courtiers of Louis XVIII. from perpetuating, as they did in brass, the few inches of soil at Calais first pressed on his return to France by the foot of that gross fat man.

There are two cities in the world, London and Paris, so full of these footstep memories, so haunted by impalpable ghosts of the traces of famous deeds, that locomotion, to one of my temperament, becomes a task very slow, if not painfully difficult, of accomplishment. ’Tis a long way from the Luxor Obelisk to the Carrousel; but it’s a week’s journey when you feel inclined to stop at every half-dozen yards’ distance, questioning yourself and the ministering spirits of your books, pointing your fingers to the paving-stones, and saying—Here the guillotine stood; here Louis died; here the daughter of Maria Theresa cast her last glance at the cupolas of the Tuileries; here Robespierre was hooted; here Théroigne de Méricourt was scourged; here Napoleon the Great showed the little king of Rome to the people; here, on the great Carrousel Place, he, arrayed in the undying gray coat and little hat, reviewed the veterans of his guard, many and many a time at EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.

[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.: ST. JAMES’S PARK.]

There! I have brought you round to the subject-matter of this article, and to the complexion of “Twice Round the Clock” again; and the stroke is, I flatter myself, felicitous—rivalling Escobar or Dom Calmet in Jesuitry, Metternich and Menschikoff in diplomacy. You thought doubtless that I was about to launch into an interminable digression; you may perhaps have said, scoffingly, that Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B., Maximillien Robespierre, Charles the First’s head, and the Emperor Napoleon’s cocked hat, could have nothing whatsoever to do with the Mall of Saint James’s Park at eight o’clock in the morning. You are mistaken. The allusions to memorable footsteps were all cunningly devised with a reference to the great Field of Famous Footsteps—the Mall, which, were the imprint of those bygone pedal pressures marked out with landmarks, such as those in the _Victory’s_ cabin, would become a very Field of the Cloth of Brass. And what better time can there be to muse upon the traditional glories of the Mall and the fame of its frequenters, than eight a.m. in sweet summer time?

I grant the clown, the dunderheaded moneyspinner who votes that books are “rubbish,” the cobweb-brained fop who languidly declares reading to be a “bore,” will find in the broad smooth Mall, just a Mall, broad and smooth, and nought else—even as Peter Bell found in a primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose, and nothing more. At eight o’clock in the morning, to clown, dunderhead, and cobweb-brain, the Mall is a short cut from Marylebone to Westminster; the water-carts are laying the dust; mechanics are going to work; there are some government offices in the distance; two big guns on queer-looking carriages; some scattered children; a good many birds, making rather a disagreeable noise, in the green trees; and a few cows being milked in a corner. But come with me, dweller in the past, lover of ancient and pleasant memories, hand-and-glove friend of defunct worthies, shadowy acquaintances in ruffs and peaked beards and point lace. Let us deliver dunderhead and cobweb-brain to the tormentors, and, sitting on a rustic bench beneath a spreading tree, summon the Famous Footsteps; summon the dead-and-gone walkers to pace the Mall again. Here they come! a brave gathering, a courtly throng, a worshipful assemblage, but oft-times a motley horde and a fantastic crew. Here is Henry the Eighth’s Mall, a park where that disreputable monarch indulged in “the games of hare and pheasant, partridge and heron, for his disport and pastime,” and where he had a deer killed for the amusement of the “Embassador from Muscovie.” Here is Saint James’s Park in the reign of clever, shrewish, cruel Queen Bess—a park only used as an appendage to the tilt-yard and a nursery for deer: here is the “inward park” (now the inclosure and ornamental water), into which, so late as the commencement of Charles II.’s reign, access to the public was denied; and where, in 1660, Master Pepys saw a man “basted” by the keeper for carrying some people over on his back through the water. Here is Charles II.’s famous Mall, for the first time broad and smooth, the park planted and reformed by the celebrated French gardener, Le Nôtre, laid out with fish-ponds and a decoy for water-fowl; the Mall itself a vista of half a mile in length, on which the game of Pall Mall was played, and which, always according to curious Samuel Pepys, who “discoursed with the keeper of the Pall Mall as he was sweeping it,” was floored with mixed earth, and over all that cockle-shells, powdered and spread to keep it fast; which, however, in dry weather, turned to dust and deadened the ball. In this park of Charles II. was the fantastic little territory of Duck Island, the ground contained within the channels of the decoy, and which London Barataria had revenues and laws and governors appointed by the king. The Duke of Saint Simon’s friend, Saint Evremond, was one of these governors; Sir John Flock another. Close to Duck Island was Rosamond’s Pond, a piece of water whose name bore a dim analogy to the _soubriquet_ with which, in later years, Waterloo Bridge has been qualified; for it was in Rosamond’s Pond that forsaken women came in preference, at even-song, to drown themselves. There was the Birdcage Walk, where Mr. Edward Storey kept his Majesty’s aviary, and dwelt in the snug little hut recently demolished, known as Storey’s Gate. There was the Mulberry Garden, into which the river Tyburn flows, and so into Tothill Fields and the Thames; and there was Spring Gardens, where the beaux went to look at the citizens’ wives; and the citizens’ wives, I hope, to drink chocolate, but I fear to look at the beaux.