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INDEX 397

WHAT I REMEMBER

I have no intention of writing an autobiography. There has been nothing in my life which could justify such a pretension. But I have lived a long time. I remember an aged porter at the monastery of the "Sagro Eremo," above Camaldoli, who had taken brevet rank as a saint solely on the score of his ninety years. His brethren called him and considered him as Saint Simon simply because he had been porter at that gate for more than sixty years. Now my credentials as a babbler of reminiscences are of a similar nature to those of the old porter. I have been here so many, many years. And then those years have comprised the best part of the nineteenth century--a century during which change has been more rapidly at work among all the surroundings of Englishmen than probably during any other century of which social history has to tell.

Of course middle-aged men know, as well as we ancients, the fact that social life in England--or rather let me say in Europe--is very different from what it was in the days of their fathers, and are perfectly well acquainted with the great and oftentimes celebrated causes which have differentiated the Victorian era from all others. But only the small records of an unimportant individual life, only the memories which happen to linger in an old man's brain, like bits of drift-weed floating round and round in the eddies of a back-water, can bring vividly before the young of the present generation those ways and manners of acting and thinking and talking in the ordinary every-day affairs of life which indicate the differences between themselves and their grandfathers.

I was born in the year 1810 at No. 16, Keppel Street, Russell Square. The region was at that time inhabited by the professional classes, mainly lawyers. My father was a barrister of the Middle Temple to the best of my recollection, but having chambers in the Old Square, Lincoln's Inn. A quarter of a century or so later, all the district in question became rather deteriorated in social estimation, but has, I am told, recently recovered itself in this respect under the careful and judicious administration of the Duke of Bedford. The whole region appeared to me, when I was recently in London, about the least changed part of the London of my youthful days. As I walked up Store Street, which runs in a line from Keppel Street to Tottenham Court Road, I spied the name of "Pidding, Confectioner." I immediately entered the shop and made a purchase at the counter. "I did not in the least want this tart," said I to the girl who was serving in the shop. "Why did you take it, then?" said she, with a little toss of her head. "Nobody asked you to buy it." "I bought it," rejoined I, "because I used to buy pastry of Mr. Pidding in this shop seventy years ago." "Lor', sir!" said the girl, "did you really?" She probably considered me to be the Wandering Jew.

I remember well that my father used to point out to me houses in Russell Square, Bedford Square, and Bloomsbury Square in which judges and other notable legal luminaries used to live. But even in those days the localities in question, especially the last named of them, were beginning to be deserted by such personages, who were already moving farther westward. The occasion of these walks with my father through the squares I have named--to which Red Lion Square might have been added--was one the painful nature of which has fixed it in my memory indelibly.

Of which more anon.

My father was in the habit of returning from his chambers to a five o'clock dinner--rather a late hour, because he was an industrious and laborious man. Well! we, that is my next brother and myself, used to walk from Keppel Street to Lincoln's Inn, so as to arrive in time to walk back with my father. He was a fast walker; and as we trotted along one on each side of him, the repetition of our morning's poetical achievements did not tend, as I well remember, to facilitate the difficulty of "keeping our wind."

But I can recall no less vividly certain expeditions of a kind which appeared to our imaginations to be--and which perhaps really were in some degree--fraught with a certain amount of peril. Stories had reached us of sundry mysteriously wicked regions, where the bandit bands of the great city consorted and lived outlaw lives under circumstances and conditions that powerfully excited our young imaginations. Especially accounts of a certain lane had reached us, where it was said all the pocket handkerchiefs stolen by all the pickpockets in London were to be seen exposed in a sort of unholy market. The name of this place was Saffron Hill. Whether any such place still exists, I know not. It has probably been swept away by the march of recent improvement. But it did in those days veritably exist. And to this extraordinary spot--as remote and strange to our fancy as the realms of Prester John--it was determined after protracted consideration by my brother and myself, that our next long ramble should be devoted. We had ascertained that the dingy land of our researches lay somewhat to the westward of Smithfield--which had already been the object of a most successful, adventurous, and delightful expedition, not without pleasurable perils of its own from excited bullocks, still more excited drovers and their dogs--and by dint of considerable perseverance we reached it, and were richly rewarded for our toil and enterprise. Report had spoken truly. Saffron Hill was a world of pocket-handkerchiefs. From every window and on lines stretched across the narrow street they fluttered in all the colours of the rainbow, and of all sizes and qualities. The whole lane was a long vista of pennon-like pocket-handkerchiefs! We should have much liked to attempt to deal in this strange market, not so much for the sake of possessing any of the articles, as with a view of obtaining experience, and informing ourselves respecting the manners and customs of the country. But we were protected from the possibly unpleasant results of any such tentative by the total absence from our pockets of any coin of the realm. We doubtless had pocket-handkerchiefs, and I have no recollection of their having been stolen. Probably it was ascertained by the inhabitants that they were not worth their notice.

But the subject reminds me of an experience of the pocket-picking world which occurred to me some twenty years later. It was at Naples. People generally in those days carried silk pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the scraps of muslin which are affected nowadays. And five silk pocket-handkerchiefs were abstracted from my pockets during my walks abroad in as many days. I then took to wearing very common ones, and lost no more! An American then at Naples, whose experiences of the proclivities of that population had been similar to mine, was not so fortunate in the result of the defensive measures he adopted. He sewed strongly into the interior of his pocket a large fish-hook. The result which he anticipated followed. The thief's hand was caught, and the American, turning sharply, seized him by the wrist and held him in a grasp like a vice till he could hand him over to a gendarme. But within a fortnight that American was stabbed to the heart one night as he was going home from the theatre. The light-fingered fraternity, it would seem, considered that such a practice was not within the laws of the game; whereas my more moderate ruse did not offend their sense of justice and fair play.

My brother and I reached home safely enough after our expedition to thief-land; and were inexhaustible in our accounts of the wonders we had witnessed. For it formed no part of our plan, and would not have been at all in accordance with the general practice of our lives to conceal the facts from our parents. Probably we had a sufficient suspicion of the questionable nature of the expedition we contemplated to prevent us from declaring it beforehand. But our education and habits would have forbidden any dream of concealing it.

Among the few surviving remembrances of those childhood's years in Keppel Street, I can still recall to the mind's eye the face and features of "Farmer," the highly trustworthy and responsible middle-aged woman who ruled the nursery there, into which a rapid succession of brothers and sisters was being introduced in those years. Farmer, as I remember her, inspired more awe than affection. She was an austere and somewhat grim sort of body. And somehow or other the obscurely terrible fact that she was an Anabaptist had reached the world of the nursery. I need hardly say that the accusation carried with it no sort of idea whatever to our minds. I don't think we had any knowledge that the mystic term in question had reference to any forms or modifications of religious belief. But we were well assured that it implied something mysterious and terrible. And I am afraid that we gracelessly availed ourselves of what we should have considered a misfortune, if we had at all known what it meant, to express on occasions of revolt against discipline, our scorn for an individual so disgraced by nature. I have still in my ear the lilt of a wicked chorus the burthen of which ran:--

Well, upon one occasion of a visit of Dr. Nott's in Keppel Street, we children were summoned to the drawing-room for his inspection; and in reply to a variety of questions as to progress, and goodness in the nursery, etc., I, as the eldest, took courage to reply that if we were not always as good and obedient in the nursery as might be desired, the circumstance was to be attributed to the painful fact that our nurse was an Anabaptist! Whether Dr. Nott was selected as the recipient of this confidential communication because I had any vague idea that this disgraceful circumstance had any special connection with his department of human affairs, I cannot say. We were however told that the fact was no wise incompatible with Farmer's character as an excellent nurse and good servant, and least of all could be considered as absolving us from the duty of obedience. I remember that I wondered then,--and I wonder still--what passed upon the subject between my mother and the Doctor after our dismissal to the nursery.

The vicar of Heckfield held the adjoining chapelry of Mattingly, at which place the morning service was performed on alternate Sundays. He was an excellent parish priest after the fashion of his day;--that is to say he was kindly to all, liberal to the poor to the utmost extent of his means, and well beloved by his neighbours, high and low. He was a charming old man, markedly gentlemanlike and suave in his manner; very nice in his person; clever unquestionably in a queer, crotchety sort of way; and thoroughly minded to do his duty according to his lights in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. But he would have had no more idea of attempting anything of the nature of active parochial work or reform, as understood at the present day, than he would have had of scheming to pay the National Debt. Indeed, the latter would have been the more likely to occupy his mind of the two, for he was crotchety and full of schemes. Especially he was fond of mechanics, and spent much money and much labour during many years on a favourite scheme for obviating the danger arising from the liability of a stage coach to be upset. He published more than one pamphlet on the subject, illustrated--I can see the pages before me now--by designs of various queer-looking models. There was a large coach-house attached to the vicarage, and it was always full of the strangest collection of models of coaches. I remember well that they all appeared to me hideous, and as aesthetically inferior to my admired "Telegraphs" and "High-Flyers" as a modern ironclad seems to the three-decker of his youth in the eyes of an old sailor. But, as may be imagined. I never ventured to broach any such heresy in my grandfather's hearing! I should unquestionably have done so had it been my father. But lesser acquaintanceship and the venerable age of my grandfather checked my presumption.

"Never, Tom," said my grandfather, "put in motion forces which you are unable to control!"

The words remained implanted in my memory. But I do not suppose they carried much instruction with them to my mind at the time.

I believe my grandfather spent more money on his mechanical fads than was quite prudent, and took out patents which were about as remunerative and useful as that which Charles the Second is said to have granted to a sailor who stood on his head on the top of Salisbury steeple, securing to him the monopoly of that practice!

I remember another eccentricity in which the vicar indulged. He said the contact of a knife's edge with earthenware, or porcelain, was extremely disagreeable. He caused, therefore, a number of dinner plates to be made with a little circular depression some two inches in diameter and about as deep as a crown piece in the centre, and had some round pieces of silver to fit into these receptacles, on which he cut his meat.

He was withal a very popular man, a good scholar, with decidedly scholarly tastes, much of a mathematician, a genuine humourist, with a sort of Horatian easy-going geniality about him, which was very charming even to us boys.

I am tempted to insert here a letter to my father from Dr. Williams, my old Winchester master, which illustrates what I have here written of my nursery tendencies. It belongs to a later date, when I was within half a year of leaving Winchester. I had not found it among my papers when I wrote the passage to which it is now appended. But I place it here in homage to the dictum that the child is father to the man.

"I have the pleasure," Dr. Williams writes, "to express my approbation of your son's conduct during the last half-year. His firmness in maintaining what was right and putting down what was wrong was very conspicuous in the early part of that time; not that I imagine it was less afterwards, but occasion did not call it forth so much."

What the occasion was I entirely forget; evidently he refers to some exercise of my power as a Prefect.

I feel no confidence that years have rendered me safe from the first fault which my excellent master thus warned me against; but I am sure they have cured me of the second.

These fragmentary recollections of our childish days may have served to suggest some hints of the changes which have made the London of the present day almost--perhaps quite--as different from the London of the second decade of this century as the latter was from "the town" in the days of George the First. But it is difficult for middle-aged people of the present day to form any vivid and sufficient conception of the greatness of them. Of course the mere material ameliorations and extensions have so metamorphosed the localities that I, on returning after long years to the London I once knew, topographically at least, so well, find myself in a new town of which the geography is in some parts strange to me, with just so much of the old landmarks remaining as serves to suggest false clues to the labyrinth and render the matter more puzzling. But the changes in ways and habits and modes of living and feeling and thinking are still greater and of much more profound significance.

To say that there were in those days no omnibuses and no cabs, and of course no railways, either under ground or over it, is a simple matter, and very easily stated. But it is not easy to picture to oneself the whole meaning and consequences of their non-existence. Let any Londoner, with the exception of the comparatively small number of those who use carriages of their own, think what his life would be, and the transaction of his day's work or of his day's pleasure, without any means of locomotion save his own legs or a hackney coach, which, at a cost of about five times the cab hire of the present day, used to shut him up in an atmosphere like that of a very dirty stable, and jolt him over the uneven pavement at a pace of about four miles an hour. Dickens has given in his own graphic way more than one sketch of the old hackney coach. I do not think that I ever saw a hackney coach that had been built for the work it was engaged in as such. They were heavy, old-fashioned, rickety vehicles, which had become too heavy, too old-fashioned, too rickety to be retained in the service of the families to which they had once belonged. They were built for the most part with hammer cloths, and many of them exhibited huge and gorgeously-painted armorial bearings on the panels. The drivers of those carriages were "in a concatenation accordingly"--shabby, slow, stupid, dirty, and often muddled with drink. We hear occasionally nowadays of a cabman "driving furiously" when drunk. The wording of the charge smacks of another era. Not all the gin in London could have stimulated the old "Jarvey" to drive his skeletons of horses furiously. He was not often incapacitated by drink, but very frequently muddled. If it was necessary for him to descend from his hammer-cloth for the purpose of opening the door of his carriage, which the presence of the "waterman" of the stand for the most part rendered unnecessary, he was a long time about it, and a longer in clambering back to his seat, loaded as he generally was in all weathers with an immense greatcoat of many capes, weatherbeaten out of all resemblance to its original colour. The "watermen," so-called, as we know from high authority, "because they opens the coach doors," were nevertheless surrounded by their half-a-dozen or so of little shallow pails of water, as they stood by the side of the curbstone near a coach stand. They were to the hackney-coachman what the bricklayer's labourer is to the bricklayer. And a more sorry sight can hardly be conceived than the "stand" with its broken-down carriages, more broken-down drivers, and most of all broken-down horses, which supplied us in the days when we "called a coach, and let a coach be called, and he that calls it, let him be the caller," as it stands written in a page almost as much forgotten as the hackney coach.

I have spoken of my delight in the spectacle of the coaches starting from and arriving at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly. But there were many other aspects of London life in the days before railroads in which the coaches made a leading feature. One of the sights of London for country cousins was to see the mails starting at 8 P.M. from the Post Office. To view it under the most favourable circumstances, one went there on the anniversary of the king's birthday, when all the guards had their scarlet coats new, and the horses' heads were all decked with flowers. And truly the yard around the Post Office offered on such an occasion a prettier sight than all the travelling arrangements of the present day could supply. Of course I am speaking of a time a little subsequent to my earliest recollections. For I can remember when the huge edifice in Saint Martin's le Grand was built; and remember well, too, the ridicule and the outcry that was raised at the size of the building, so enormously larger, it was supposed, than could possibly be needed! But it has now long since been found altogether insufficient for the needs of the service.

A journey on the box of the mail was a great delight to me in those days--days somewhere in the third decade of the century; and faith! I believe would be still, if there were any mails available for the purpose. One journey frequently performed by me with infinite delight was to Exeter. My business was to visit two old ladies living there, Miss Mary and Miss Fanny Bent. The Rev. John Bent, rector of Crediton, had married the sister of my grandmother, the Rev. William Milton's wife. Miss Mary Bent was his daughter by a second wife; but her half-sister, Fanny Bent, as we and everybody else called her, was thus my mother's first cousin, and the tie between Fanny Milton and Fanny Bent had always from their earliest years been a very close one.

But if the despatches, which it was the mail's business to carry, could once upon a time be contained in that hinder boot, such had ceased to be the case before my day. The bulk of postal matter which had to be carried was continually and rapidly increasing, and I have often seen as many as nine enormous sacks heaped on the coach roof. The length of these sacks was just sufficient to reach from one side of the coach to the other, and the huge heap of them, three or even four tiers high, was piled to a height which was sufficient to prevent the guard, even when standing, from seeing or communicating with the coachman. If to the consideration of all this the reader will add a remembrance of the Somersetshire and Devonshire roads, over which this top-heavy load had to be carried at about twelve miles an hour, it will not seem strange to him that accidents should have occurred. Not that the roads were bad; they were, thanks to Macadam, good, hard, and smooth; but the hills are numerous, and in many cases very steep.

It was a pretty thing to see the changing of the horses. There stood the fresh team, two on the off side, two on the near side, and the coach was drawn up with the utmost exactitude between them. Four ostlers jump to the splinter-bars and loose the traces; the reins have already been thrown down. The driver retains his seat, and within the minute the coach is again on its onward journey.

Then how welcome was breakfast at an excellent old-world country inn--twenty minutes allowed. The hot tea, after your night's drive, the fresh cream, butter, eggs, hot toast, and cold beef, and then, with cigar alight, back to the box and off again!

I once persuaded my mother, who was returning with me from Exeter to London, to make the journey on the box of the Telegraph, while I sat behind her. She had been a good deal afraid of the experiment, but admitted that she had never enjoyed a journey more.

But having been led by my coaching reminiscences to speak of my visits to Exeter and to Fanny Bent, I must not turn that page of the past without dedicating a few lines to one to whom I had great cause to be gratefully attached, and whose character both in its high worth and its originality and singularity was a product of that day hardly likely to be reproduced in this.

A pious Churchwoman of these improved days would not, I take it, select such a place and such a time for such whisperings. But I am sure it would be difficult to find a better or more sincere Christian than dear old Fanny Bent. And the anecdote may be accepted as one more illustration of change in manners, feeling, and decencies.

Then there were strawberry and cream parties at a place called, it I remember right, Hoopern Bowers, always with a bevy of pretty girls, for attracting whom my plain old spinster cousin seemed to possess a special secret; and excursions to Marypole Head, and drives over Haldon Down. When I revisited Exeter some months ago Hoopern Bowers seemed to have passed from the memory of man! And whether any one of the laughing girls I had known there was still extant as a grey-headed crone, I could not learn! Marypole Head too has been nearly swallowed up by the advancing tide of "villas" surging up the hill, though the look-down on the other side over Upton Pynes and the valley of the Exe is lovely as ever. And Haldon Down at all events is as breezy as of yore!

And now, all gone! Probably not one of all those who made those little festivities so pleasant to me remains on the face of the earth! At all events every one of them has many many years ago passed out of the circle of light projected by my magic lanthorn!

And how many others have passed like phantasmagoric shadows across that little circle of light! It is one of the results of such a rolling-stone life as mine has been, that the number of persons I have known, and even made friends of for the time, has been immense; but they all pass like a phantom procession! How many! How many! They have trooped on into the outer darkness and been lost!

I suppose that during the half century, or nearly that time--from 1840 to 1886--that I knew little or nothing of England, the change that has come upon all English life has been nearly as great in one part of the country as another. But on visiting Exeter a few months ago I was much struck at its altered aspect, because I had known it well in my youth. It was not so much that the new rows of houses and detached villas seemed to have nearly doubled the extent of the city, and obliterated many of the old features of it, as that the character of the population seemed changed. It was less provincial--a term which cockneys naturally use in a disparaging sense, but which in truth implies quite as much that is pleasant, as the reverse. It seemed to have been infected by much of the ways and spirit of London, without of course having anything of the special advantages of London to offer. People no longer walked down the High Street along a pavement abundantly ample for the traffic, nodding right and left to acquaintances. Everybody knew everybody no longer. The leisurely gossiping ways of the shopkeepers had been exchanged for the short and sharp promptitude of London habits. I recognised indeed the well-remembered tone of the cathedral bells. But the cathedral and its associations and influences did not seem to hold the same place in the city life as it did in the olden time of my young days. There was an impalpable and very indescribable but yet unmistakably sensible something which seemed to shut off the ecclesiastical life on one side of the close precincts from the town life on the other, in a manner which was new to me. I have little doubt that if I had casually asked in any large--say--grocer's shop in the High Street, who was the canon in residence, I should have received a reply indicating that the person inquired of had not an idea of what I was talking about; and am very sure that half a century ago the reply to the same question would have been everywhere a prompt one.

The lovely garden close under the city wall on the northern side,--perhaps the prettiest city garden in England--with its remarkably beautiful view of the cathedral exists still, somewhat more closely shut in by buildings. We were indeed permitted to walk there the other day by the kindness of the present proprietor, merely as members of "the public," which would not have been dreamed of in those old days when "the public" was less thought of than at present. But I could not help thinking that "the public" and I, as a portion and representative of it, must be a terrible nuisance to the owner of that beautiful and tranquil spot, so great as seriously to diminish the value of it.

But I have been beguiled into all these reminiscences of the fair capital of the west and my early days there, by the quicksilver mail, itself a most compendious and almost complete illustration of the nature of the differences between its own day and that of its successor, the rail!

To the rail is due principally much of the changed appearance of London. Certainly the domestic architecture of the Georgian period has little enough of beauty to recommend it. It is insignificant, mean and prosaic to an extraordinary degree, as we all know. But it is not marked by the audacious, ostentatious, nightmare-hideousness of the railway arches and viaducts and stations of modern London. It is difficult to say whether the greatest change in the daily life and habits of a Londoner has been produced by gas, by Peel's police, electric telegraphy, modern postal arrangements, or the underground railway. Can the present generation picture to itself what London was and looked like when lighted only by the few twinkling oil lamps which seemed to serve no other purpose save to make darkness visible? Can it conceive a London policeless by day, and protected at night only by a few heavily great-coated watchmen, very generally asleep in their "boxes," and equipped with a huge rattle in one hand and a large stable lanthorn in the other? The twopenny post was considered an immense boon to Londoners and their needs of quick communication between the different districts of their even then overgrown town. But what would they have thought of an almost hourly postal delivery, and of the insufficient quickness of that being supplemented by telegraphic messages, to be outstripped in their turn by telephony? And what would the modern Londoner think of doing without all these things?

But perhaps the underground railways have most of all revolutionised the London habits of the present day. Why, even to me, who knew cabless London, they seem to have become indispensable. I loathe them! The hurry-scurry! The necessity of "looking sharp!" The difficulty of ascertaining which carriage you are to take, and of knowing when you have arrived at your journey's end! The horrible atmosphere! All strong against the deed! And yet the necessities of time and place in the huge overgrown monster of a town seem to compel me to pass a large portion of my hours among the sewers, when I find myself a dazed and puzzled stranger in the town I once knew so well.

Then, marvelling at the ubiquitous railway bridges and arches, which seem to return again and again like the recurring horrors of a nightmare dream, I passed westward, where the Fleet Prison is not, and where even Temple Bar is no more, till I came to Chancery Lane, which seemed to retain much of its old dinginess, and passed thence under the unchanged old gateway into Lincoln's Inn Old Square, where my father's chambers were, and where I used to go to him with my nonsense verses.

Old Square looks much as it used to look, I think. And the recollection darted across my mind--who shall say why?--of a queer-looking shambling figure, whom my father pointed out to me one day from the window of his chambers. "That," said he, "is Jockey Bell, perhaps the first conveyancer in England. He probably knows more of the law of real property than any man breathing." He was a rather short, squab-looking, and very shabby figure, who walked, I think, a little lame. He came, I was told, from the north country, and spoke with a strong Northumbrian accent. "It is a dreadful thing to have to decipher an opinion of his," said my father; "he is said to have three handwritings--one when he is sober, which he can read himself; one when he is drunk, which his clerk can read; and one next morning after being drunk, which no human being can read!"

And I looked for the little shabby stuffy court, in which I had so often watched Eldon's lowering brow, as he doubted over some knotty point. My father had the highest opinion of his intellectual power and legal knowledge. But he did not like him. He used to say that his mind was an instrument of admirable precision, but his soul the soul of a pedlar. I take it Eldon's quintessential Toryism was obnoxious to my father's Liberalism. He used to repeat the following "report" of a case in the Court of Chancery:--

"Mr. Leech made a speech; 'Twas learned, terse, and strong. Mr. Hart on the other part, Was neat and glib, but wrong. Mr. Parker made it darker; 'Twas dark enough without! Mr. Cook cited a book; And the Chancellor said, I doubt."

Another difference between that day and this of very considerable social significance may be observed in the character and development of the slang in use. There was at the former period very little slang of the kind that may be considered universal. Different classes had different phrases and locutions that were peculiar to them, and served more or less as a bond of union and exclusiveness as regarded outsiders. The criminal classes had their slang. The Universities had theirs. There was costermongers' slang. And there was a slang peculiar to the inner circles of the fashionable world, together with many other special dialects that might be named. But the specialities of these various idioms were not interchangeable, nor for the most part intelligible outside the world to which they belonged. Nor--and this difference is a very notable one--did slang phrases grow into acceptance with the rapidity or universality which now characterises their advent--a notable difference, because it, of course, arises from the increased rapidity of communication and from the much greater degree in which all classes and all provincial and town populations are mixed together and rubbed against each other. It used to be said, and is still said by some old world folks, that the use of slang is vulgar. And the younger generation, which uses it universally, ridicules much the old fogey narrowness which so considers it. But the truth is, that there was in the older time nothing really vulgar in the use of the slang which then prevailed. Why should not every class and every profession have its own shibboleths and its own phrases? And is there not real vulgarity in the mind which considers a man vulgar for using the language of the class to which he really belongs? But the modern use of slang is truly vulgar for a very different reason. It is vulgar because it arises from one of the most intrinsically vulgar of all the vulgar tendencies of a vulgar mind--imitation. There are slang phrases, which, because they vividly or graphically express a conception, or clothe it with humour, are admirable. But they are admirable only in the mouths of their inventors.

There was an old gentleman who had a very tolerable notion of what is vulgar and what is not, and who characterised "imitators" as a "servile herd." And surely, if, as we are often told, this is a vulgar age, the fact is due to the prevalence of this very tap-root of vulgarity, imitation. Of course I am not speaking of imitation in any of the various cases in which there is an end in view outside the fact of the imitation. The child in order to speak must imitate those whom it hears speaking. If you would make a pudding, you must imitate the cook; if a coat, the tailor. But the imitation which is essentially vulgar, the very tap-root, as I have said, of vulgarity, is imitation for imitation's sake. And that is why I think modern slang is essentially vulgar. If it is your real opinion--right or wrong matters not--that any slang phrase expresses any idea with peculiar accuracy, vividness, or humour, use it by all means; and he is a narrow blockhead who sees any vulgarity in your doing so. But for heaven's sake, my dear Dick, don't use it merely because you heard Bob use it!

Yet there is something pathetically humble too about a man so conscious of his own worthlessness as to be ever anxious to look like somebody else. And surely a man must have a painful consciousness of his inability to utter any word of his own with either wit or wisdom or sense in it, who habitually strives to borrow the wit of the last retailer of the current slang whom he has heard.

Among the sights and sounds which were familiar to the eye and ear in the London of my youth, and which are so no longer, may be mentioned the twopenny postman. Not many probably of the rising generation are aware, that in their fathers' days the London postal service was dual The "twopenny postman," who delivered letters sent from one part of London to another, was a different person from the "general postman," who delivered those which came from the country. The latter wore a scarlet, the former a blue livery. And the two administrations were entirely distinct. In those days, when a letter from York to London cost a shilling, or not much less, the weight of a single letter was limited solely by the condition that it must be written on one sheet or piece of paper only. Two pieces of paper, however small, or however light, incurred a double postage. I have sent for a single postage an enormous sheet of double folio outweighing some ten sheets of ordinary post paper. Of course envelopes were unknown. Every sheet had to be folded so that it could be sealed and the address written on the back of it.

Another notable London change which occurs to me is that which has come to the Haymarket. In my day it was really such. The whole right hand side of the street going downwards, from the Piccadilly end to the Opera House, used to be lined with loads of hay. The carts were arranged in close order side by side with their back parts towards the foot pavement, which was crowded by the salesmen and their customers.

I might say a good deal too about the changes in the theatrical London world and habits, but the subject is a large one, and has been abundantly illustrated. It is moreover one which in its details is not of an edifying nature. And it must suffice, therefore, to bear my testimony to the greatness of the purifying change which has been brought about in all the habits of playgoers and playhouses mainly and firstly by the exertions of my mother's old and valued friend Mr. Macready.

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