To the man who thoroughly appreciates the Essays of Elia, and Boswell's Life of Johnson, London can never grow tiresome. He can never turn a corner without finding "something new, something to please, and something to instruct." Its very pavements are classical. And there is nothing to abate, nor detract from, such a man's enthusiasm. The traveller who visits the Roman Forum, or the Palace of the Cæsars, experiences a sad check when he finds his progress impeded by unpoetical obstacles. But in London, all is harmonious; he sees on every side, not only that which tells of present life and prosperity, but the perennial glories of England's former days. Would he study history, he goes to the Tower, "rich with the spoils of time"; or to Whitehall, where mad fanaticism consummated its treasonable work with the murder of a sovereign; or to the towering minster, to gaze upon the chair in which the monarchs of a thousand years have sat; or to view the monuments, and read the epitaphs, of that host of
"Bards, heroes, sages, side by side,
Who darkened nations when they died."
Is he a lover of English literature? Here are scenes eloquent of that goodly company of wits and worthies, whose glowing pages have been the delight of his youth and the consolation of his riper years; here are the streets in which they walked, the taverns in which they feasted, the churches where they prayed, the tombs where they repose.
And London wears well. To revisit it when age has sobered down the enthusiasm of youth, is not like seeing a theatre by daylight; but you think almost that you have under-estimated your privileges. How well I remember the night when I first arrived in the metropolis! It was after ten o'clock, and I was much fatigued; but before I booked myself in my hotel, or looked at my room, I rushed out into the Strand, "with breathless speed, like a soul in chase." I pushed along, now turning to look at Temple Bar, now pausing to take breath as I went up Ludgate Hill. I saw St. Paul's and its dome before me, and I was satisfied. No, I was not satisfied; for when I returned up Fleet Street, I looked out dear old Bolt Court, and entered its Johnsonian precincts with an awe and veneration which a devout Mussulman, taking the early train for Mecca, would gladly imitate. And then I posted down Inner Temple Lane, and looked at the house in which Charles Lamb and his companions held their "Wednesday nights"; and, going still farther, I saw the river – I stood on the bank of the Thames, and I was satisfied. I looked, and all the associations of English history and literature which are connected with it filled my mind – but just as I was getting into a fine frenzy about it, a watchman hove in sight, and the old clock chimed out eleven. So I started on, and soon reached my hotel. I was accosted on my way thither by a young and gayly dressed lady, whom I did not remember ever to have seen before, but who expressed her satisfaction at meeting me, in the most cordial terms. I told her that I thought that it must be a mistake, and she responded with a laugh which very much shocked an elderly gentleman who was passing, who looked as if he might have been got up for the part of the uncle of the unhappy G. Barnwell. I have since learned that such mistakes and personal misapprehensions very frequently occur in London in the evening.
Speaking of Temple Bar, it gratifies me to see that this venerable gateway still stands, "unshaken, unseduced, unterrified," by any of the recent attempts to effect its removal. The old battered and splashed doors are perhaps more unsightly than before; but the statues look down with the same benignity upon the crowd of cabs and omnibuses, and the never-ending tide of humanity which flows beneath them, as they did upon the Rake's Progress, so many years ago. The sacrilegious commissioners of streets long to get at it with their crows and picks, but the shade of Dr. Johnson watches over the barrier of his earthly home. It is not an ornamental affair, to be sure, and it would be difficult for Mr. Choate, even, to defend it against the charge of being an obstruction; but its associations with the literature and history of the last two or three centuries ought to entitle its dingy arches to a certain degree of reverence, even in our progressive and irreverent age. The world would be a loser by the demolition of this ancient landmark, and London, if it should lose this, though it might still be the metropolis of the British empire, would cease to be the London of Johnson and Goldsmith, of Addison and Pope, of Swift and Hogarth.
Perhaps some may think, from what I have said in the commencement of this letter, that my enthusiasm has blinded me to those great moral and social evils which are apparent in English civilization; but it is not so. I love England rather for what she has been than for what she is; I love the England of Alfred and St. Edward; and when I contrast the present state with what it might have been under a succession of such rulers, I cannot but grieve. Truly the court of St. James under Victoria is not what it was under Charles II., nor even under Mr. Thackeray's favourite hero, "the great George IV.," – but are not St. James and St. Giles farther apart than ever before? Is not Lazarus looked upon as a nuisance, which legislation ought, for decency's sake, to put out of the way? What does England do for the poor? Nothing; absolutely nothing, if you except a system of workhouses, compared with which prisons are delightful residences, and which seems to have been intended more for the punishment of poverty than as a work of charity. No; on the contrary, she discountenances works of charity; when a few earnest men among the clergy of her divided church make an effort in that direction, there is an outcry, and they must be put down; and their bishops, whose annual incomes are larger than the whole treasury of Alfred, admonish them to beware how they thus imitate the superstitions of the middle ages. No; your Englishman of the present day has something better to do than to look after the beggar at his doorstep; he is too respectable a man for that; he pays his "poor rates," and the police must order the thing of shreds and patches to "move on"; his progress must not be impeded, for his presence is required at a meeting of the friends of Poland, or of Italy, or of a society for the abolition of American slavery, and he has no time to waste on such common, every-day matters as the improvement of the miserable wretches who work his coal mines, or of those quarters of the town where vice parades its deformity with exulting pride, and the air is heavy with pestilence. There is proportionably more beggary in London at this hour than in any continental city. And such beggary! Not the comfortable, jolly-looking beggars you may see in Rome or Naples, who know that charity is enjoined upon the people as a religious duty, but the thin, pallid, high-cheeked supplicants, whose look is a petition which tells a more effective story than words can frame of destitution and starvation.
But there is another phase of this part of London life, sadder by far than that of mere poverty. It is an evil which no attempt is made to prevent, and so great an evil that its very mention is forbidden by the spirit of this age of "superficial morality and skin-deep propriety." I pity the man who can walk through Regent Street or the Strand in the evening, unsaddened by what he shall see on every side. How ridiculous do our boasts of this Christian nineteenth century seem there! Here is this mighty Anglo-Saxon race, which can build steam engines, and telegraphs, and clipper ships, which tunnels mountains, and exerts an almost incredible mastery over the forces of nature, – and yet, when Magdalene looks up to it for a merciful hand to lift her from degradation and sin, she finds it either deaf or powerless. There is a work yet to be done in London which would stagger a philanthropist, if he were gifted with thrice the heroism, and patience, and self-forgetfulness of a St. Vincent of Paul.
I cannot resist the inclination to give in this connection a passage from the personal experience of a friend in London, which, had I read it in any book or newspaper, I should have hesitated to believe. One evening, as he was passing along Pall Mall, he was addressed by a young woman, who, when she saw that he was going to pass on and take no notice of her, ran before him, and said in a tone of the most pathetic earnestness, —
"Well, if you'll not go with me, for God's sake, sir, give me a trifle to buy bread!"
Thus appealed to, and somewhat shaken by the voice and manner, he stopped under a gaslight, and looked at the speaker. Vice had not impressed its distinctive seal so strongly upon her as upon most of the unfortunate creatures one meets in London's streets; indeed, there was a shade of melancholy on her face which harmonized well with her voice and manner. So my friend resolved to have a few words more with her, and buttoning up his coat, to protect his watch