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.
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.”