I have heard Regent Street compared to the Boulevard des Italiens, to Unter-den-Linden at Berlin, to Broadway at New York, to the Montagne de la Cour at Brussels, to the Corso de’ Servi at Milan, to the Toledo at Naples, to George Street, Sydney, and to the Nevskoi Perspective at Petersburg. In my opinion, Regent Street is an amalgamation of all these streets, and surpasses them all. Their elements are strained, filtered, refined, condensed, sublimated, to make up one glorious thoroughfare. Add to this, the unique and almost indescribable cachet which the presence of English aristocracy lends to every place it chooses for its frequentation, and the result is Regent Street. Of the many cities I have wandered into and about, there is but one possessing a street that can challenge comparison with—and that, I must confess, well nigh equals—the street that Nash, prince of architects, built for the fourth George. At a right angle from the pleasant waters of the river Liffey, there runs a street, wide in dimensions, magnificent in the proportions of its edifices, splendid in its temples and its palaces, though many of the latter, alas! are converted now into hotels, now into linen-drapers’ shops; but on a golden summer’s afternoon, when you see, speeding towards the column of Nelson in the distance, the glittering equipages of the rich and noble, who yet have their dwelling in Eblana; the clattering orderlies, on sleek-groomed horses, and with burnished accoutrements, spurring from the Castle towards the Post Office—and, beauty of beauties, the side walks on either hand converted into parterres of living flowers, the grand and glorious Irish girls, with their bright raiment and brighter eyes; you will acknowledge that Regent Street has a rival, that beyond St. George’s Channel is a street that the triumphal procession of a Zenobia or a Semiramis might pass down, and that the queen of streets is Sackville Street, Dublin.
Do you know, youth of the present generation—for I fondly hope that I have good store of juveniles among my readers—that Regent Street has its antiquities, its archæologia, its topographical curiosities? Mr. Peter Cunningham knows them all by heart; I am not about to steal from the “Handbook of London” of our modern Camden; but will just tell you, in my desultory way, that, in the days when the Mews reared their head, an unsightly mass of brick buildings, in the area which is now Trafalgar Square; when Carlton House loomed at the eastern end of Pall Mall, instead of the ugly post erected as a monument of national gratitude to the Royal Duke who paid nobody; when the Golden Cross, Charing Cross, was hemmed in by a cobweb mass of dirty tenements, and Hungerford Market was yet a mass of fishy hovels ungraced by Hungerford Hall and Mr. Gatti’s penny-ice shop; when the old “Courier” newspaper office stood (over-against Mr. Cross’s older Exeter ’Change, with the elephant’s tusks displayed outside, the shops beneath, and Chunee and the wild beasts all alive and roaring upstairs) in the space that now forms the approach to Waterloo Bridge; and when the vicinity of Temple Bar was blocked up by a brick-and-mortar cloaca, since swept away to form what is now termed Picket Place. Are you at all aware, neophytes in topographical lore, that the area of Regent Street the superb, was occupied by mean and shambling tenth-rate avenues, among which the chiefest was a large, dirty highway, called Great Swallow Street? Old Fuller (I don’t know why he should be called “old” so persistently, for he did not attain anything like a venerable age) was in the habit of collecting information for the “Worthies of England” from the tottering crones who sat spinning by the ingle-nook, and from the white-headed grand-sires sunning themselves on the bench by the almshouse door. In like manner, I owe much of the information I possess on the aspect of London streets, at the time just previous to my nonage, to communing with nurses and nurses’ female friends. The good folks who tend children, seldom deem that the little pitchers they say jestingly have long ears, will suck their lore in so greedily, or retain it so long.
My personal acquaintance with Regent Street dates from the year ’thirty-two, when I remember a great scrambling procession of operatives, with parti-coloured flags, emblazoned with devices I could not read, passing down it. Mrs. Esner, who was then attached to my person in a domestic capacity (she often calls upon me now, and, saying that she “nussed” me, expatiates on the benefits of a pound of green tea), told me that these operatives belonged to the “Trades Union.” She said—though the good woman must have exaggerated—that they were half a million in number, and I recollect her portending, in a grave low voice, that there would be riots that night. I don’t think that any occurred; but long after, whenever I saw a crowd I used to ask whether “there would be any riots” that night, just as I might have inquired whether there would be any bread-and-butter for tea. This was about the time that they used to call the great Duke of Wellington “Nosey,” and “Sawbones,” and to break his windows. I was too young to know then, that the Athenians grew tired of hearing Aristides called “The Just;” and that a nation once grumbled at having to pay for the palace it had bestowed upon that John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who won the battle of Blenheim. I think, too, there must have been something about the Cholera in my earliest recollections of Regent Street; yet, no: I lived in North Audley Street at that time, and opposite the mansion of the great Earl of Clarendon; for, as clearly as though it were yesterday, I see now in the eye to which the attention of Horatio, friend of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, was directed—a hot autumn afternoon. I am at the nursery-window in sad disgrace, and pouting because I have wrenched the sprightly wooden hussar from the horse which had the semi-circle of wire with the bullet at the end fixed in his stomach, and who used, with that impetus, to swing so deftly. There is much commotion in the great earl’s mansion; for one of the servants partook too plentifully last night of gooseberry-fool after a rout his lordship gave—where are the “routs” and the “gooseberry-fools” now?—and she is dead this morning of cholera morbus. My female entourage are unanimously exacting in calling it cholera “morbus.” The undertaker’s men bring the body out; the shell gleams white in the afternoon’s sunshine, and it is begirt with cords; “for,” says the domestic oracles behind me, “it was so mortal swole that it would ’ave bust else.” A horrible rumour runs about, that the coffin has been “pitched and sealed.” What can “pitching and sealing” mean? There is a great crowd before the earl’s door, who are violent and clamorous, because rumour—a servant’s hall, an area gate, a coachman from-the-house-to-his-wife-in-the-mews rumour—bruits it about that the body has not been washed. My nurse says that they will have to send for the “padroll” with “cut-lashes.” All these things sink into my little mind; and then the whole sequel, with a train of years behind it, fade away, leaving me with but one more recollection—that we had a twopenny cottage-loaf boiled in milk that day for dinner, which was consequently swollen to twice its natural size; and which the Eumenides of the nursery authoritatively assured me was, with brown sugar, the “best puddin’ out.” I know now that congested loaf to have been an insipid swindle.
I am again in Regent Street, but at another window, and in another house. There is no nurse now, but a genteel young woman, aged about thirty—she asked me once, for fun, how old she was, and I guessed, in all youthful seriousness, fifty, whereupon she slapped me—to take care of me. Her name is Sprackmore, she has long corkscrew ringlets, and is very pious, and beneath her auspices I first study the “Loss of the Kent East Indiaman,” and the “Dairyman’s Daughter.” She has fits, too, occasionally. I am just of that age to be a hollow-eyed little boy in a tunic, with a frill and a belt, and to be dreadfully afraid of the parent I used a year before to love and caress with such fearless confidence. They say I am a clever child, and my cleverness is encouraged by being told that I am not to ask questions, and that I had much better go and play with my toys than mope over that big volume of Lyttelton’s “History of England,” lent to me by Mr. Somebody, the lawyer—I see him now, very stout and gray, at the funeral whenever any of us dies: of which volume—it is in very shabby condition—I break the top-cover off by letting it fall from the chair, which is my reading-desk. I suffer agonies of terror and remorse for months, lest the fracture should be discovered, though I have temporarily repaired it by means of a gimlet and a piece of twine. Then, one bright day, my cousin Sarah gives me a bright five-shilling piece—I take her to the opera now, but she always remembers my childish dependence upon her, and insists upon paying the cab home—and take Lyttelton’s “History,” still with great fear and trembling, to a bookbinder’s in Broad Street, Golden Square, who tells me that the “hends is jagged,” and that there must be a new back, lettering, and gilding to the book. He works his will with it, and charges me four shillings and sixpence out of the five shilling-piece for working it; but to tell of the joyful relief I feel when I bring Lyttelton’s “History” back safe and sound! I do not get rid of my perturbation entirely, however, till I have rubbed the back against the carpet a little to soil it, in order that it may not look too new. Oh! the agonies, the Laocoon-like conscience windings, the Promethean tortures, that children suffer through these accidental breakages! Oh! the unreasoning cruelty of parents, who punish children for such mischances! So I am the little boy in a tunic; and I daresay that, with my inquisitiveness, and my moping over books, I am an intolerable little nuisance. I am at the Regent Street window, and much speculation is rife as to whether the King, who is lying mortally sick at Windsor, is dead. For it is within a few minutes of eleven, and at that time the well-known troop of Horse Guards pass on their way to St. James’s; and it is reasonably inferred that, if King William be gathered to his fathers, the standard will be furled. The Guards pass; they wore helmets, with plumes above them shaped like black mutton chops—not the casques with the flowing horse-hair they wear now; and to be sure the standard is furled, in a species of drab umbrella case. The King is dead for sure; nay, he does not die for a full week afterwards; the flag was merely furled because the day was dark and lowering, presaging rain.
TWO O’CLOCK P.M.: REGENT STREET.
I told you hours since that I lived in the house in Regent Street in which the Marquis de Bourbel forged his letters of credit.[5] I think that I am qualified to speak of the place, for, walking down it the other day, I counted no less than eleven houses, between the two circuses, in which I had at one time dwelt. But they were all early, those remembrances, and connected with the time when the colonnade of the Quadrant existed—“La ville de Londres,” as the foreign engravers of pictorial note-paper used grandiloquently to call it. Whatever could have possessed our Commissioner of Woods and Forests to allow those unrivalled arcades to be demolished! The stupid tradesmen, whose purblind, shop-till avarice led them to petition for the removal of the columns, gained nothing by the change, for the Quadrant, as a lounge in wet weather, was at once destroyed; and I see now many of the houses, once let out in superior apartments, occupied as billiard-rooms and photographic studios, and many of the shops invaded and conquered by cheap tailors. The Quadrant colonnade afforded not only a convenient shelter beneath, but it was a capital promenade for the dwellers in the first-floors above. The entresols certainly were slightly gloomy; and moustached foreigners, together with some gaily-dressed company still naughtier, could with difficulty be restrained from prowling backwards and forwards between Glasshouse Street and the County Fire Office. But, perambulating Regent Street at all hours of the day and night, as I do now frequently, I see no diminution in the number of moustached, or rouged, or naughty faces, whose prototypes were familiar to me, years agone, in the brilliant Quadrant. As to the purlieus of the County Fire Office, they are confusion, and a scandal to London and its police. The first-floor balconies above were in my childhood most glorious playgrounds. There I kept preserves of broken bottles and flowerpots; on those leads I inscribed fantastic devices in chalk and with penknives, drawing silver diagrams through the cake of dust and dried refrain that covered the metal; and often have I come to domestic grief through an irresistible propensity for poaching on the balconies of the neighbours on either side. Still in a state of tunic-hood, I remember a very tall, handsome gentleman, with a crimson velvet under-waistcoat—I saw his grave in Perè la Chaise last winter—who was my great aider and abettor in these juvenile escapades. He had a wondrous weapon of offence called a “sabar-cane,” a delightful thing (to me then), half walking-stick, half pea-shooter, from which he used to discharge clay pellets at the vagrant cats on the adjoining balconies. He it was who was wont to lean over the balcony, and fish for people’s hats with a salmon-hook affixed to the extremity of a tandem-whip; he it was who came home from the Derby (quite in a friendly manner) to see us one evening, all white—white hat, white coat, white trousers, white waistcoat, white neckerchief, white boots, to say nothing of the dust and the flour with which he had been plentifully besprinkled at Kennington Gate. He had won heavily on some horse long since gone to grass for ever, was very merry, and insisted upon winding-up our new French clock with the snuffers. He it was who made nocturnal excursions from parapet to parapet along the leads, returning with bewildering accounts of bearded men who were gambling with dice at No. 92; of the tenor of the Italian Opera, who, knife in hand, was pursuing his wife (in her nightdress) about the balcony, at No. 74; and of Mademoiselle Follejambes, the premier sujet of the same establishment, who was practising pirouettes before a cheval glass at the open window of No. 86, while Mademoiselle Follejambe’s mamma, with a red cotton pocket-handkerchief tied round her old head, was drinking anisette out of a tea-cup. You must be forbearing with me, if, while I speak of Regent Street, I interlard my speech with foreign languages a little. For, from its first erection, the Quadrant end of Regent Street has been the home of the artistic foreigners who are attracted to London during the musical and operatic season, less by inclination for the climate and respect for the institutions of England, than by a profound admiration for the circular effigies, in gold, (with neatly milled edges) of her Majesty the Queen, which John Bull so liberally bestows on those who squall or fiddle for him, provided they be of foreign extraction. Let me not be too unjust, however, to Bull. Find him but a real English tenor, and J. B. will smother him in bank-notes, and deafen him with plaudits. From the balconies of Regent Street, I have seen the greatest cantatrici and ballerine of this age. The Grand Cham of tenors, who has never been replaced—no signor Mario, no Signor Giuglini, no Signor Mongini, no Signor Tamberlik, no Mr. Sims Reeves, no Mr. George Perren—the incomparable Rubini, had lodgings opposite, once, to where we dwelt, at a shawl shop. I have watched the sedulous care which that eminent man took of his health, marvelled at the multitudinous folds of silk or woollen stuff, like the turban of an Asiatic, with which he encircled his invaluable throat when he took out-door exercise. I have seen, through his open window, the basso of basso’s, Papa Lablache, the man with the lion’s head, the Falstaffian abdomen, and the ten times stentorian lungs, eat maccaroni for twenty-seven consecutive minutes, till he seemed determined to outdo all the ribbon-swallowing conjurors who had ever lived. We used to say that he was practising for Leporello. He had a kindly heart, Papa Lablache, and preserved a kindly remembrance of the hearty English people, among whom he made his fortune. Though he would sometimes facetiously declare, that when his voice was no longer fit to be heard in a Continental city, he would come to England to settle, and sing “Fra questi sordi” among these deaf ones—for whom he would still be quite good enough—his heart never cooled towards the old country; and, moribund at Naples, when the supreme Hour was fast arriving, he raised himself on his couch, and essayed to sing a song he loved very well—“Home! sweet Home!” But, as the silver cord loosened, he murmured, “Mi manca la voce”—“My voice fails me;” and so died.