Quitting the Country, we shall find London but ill qualified to compensate us for the losses we have sustained there; and if there be any reason in betaking oneself to places at the seaside, that are neither London nor the Country, now is the time to do it—as the citizens of London, and the liberties thereof, know full well. Accordingly, now the mansions in Finsbury and Devonshire Squares on the East, and Queen and Russell on the West, are changed for mouse-traps (miscalled marine villas); and the tradesman who does not send his wife and family to wash themselves in sea-water cannot be doing well in the world. Now, therefore, the Brighton boarding-houses bask in the sunshine of city favour, always provided their drawing-rooms look upon the sea; and if you pass them on a warm afternoon about five o’clock, you may see their dining-room windows wide open, and their inmates acting a picturesque passage in one of Mr. Wordsworth’s pastorals:
“There are forty feeding like one.”
But if the citizens (because they cannot help it) permit their wives and daughters to be in their glory, out of London at this period, they permit their apprentices, for the same reason, to be so in it: for now arrives that Saturnalia of nondescript noise and nonconformity, Bartlemy Fair;—when that Prince of peace-officers, the Lord Mayor, changes his sword of state into a sixpenny trumpet, and becomes the Lord of Misrule and the patron of pickpockets; and Lady Holland’s name leads an unlettered mob instead of a lettered one; when Mr. Richardson maintains, during three whole days and a half, a managerial supremacy that must be not a little enviable even in the eyes of Mr. Elliston himself; and Mr. Gyngell holds, during the same period, a scarcely less distinguished station as the Apollo of servant-maids; when “the incomparable (not to say eternal) young Master Saunders” rides on horseback to the admiration of all beholders, in the person of his eldest son; and when all the giants in the land, and the dwarfs too, make a general muster, and each proves to be, according to the most correct measurement, at least a foot taller or shorter than any other in the fair, and, in fact, the only one worth seeing,—“all the rest being impostors!” In short, when every booth in the fair combines in itself the attractions of all the rest, and so perplexes with its irresistible merit the rapt imagination of the half-holiday schoolboys who have got but sixpence to spend upon the whole, that they eye the outsides of each in a state of pleasing despair, till their leave of absence is expired twice over, and then return home filled with visions of giants and gingerbread-nuts, and dream all night long of what they have not seen.
Au reste, London must needs be but a sorry place in September, when even its substantial shopkeepers are ashamed to be seen in it, and when a careful porter may, if he pleases, carry a load on his head from Saint Paul’s to the Mansion House, without damaging the heads of more than half a dozen pedestrians.
As for the West End at this period, it looks like a model of itself, seen through a magnifying glass—every thing is so sad, silent, and empty of life. The vacant windows look blank at each other across the way; the doors and their knockers are no more at variance; the porters sleep away the heavy hours in their easy chairs, leaving the rings to be answered from the area; and if you want to cross the street, you look both ways first, for fear of being run over—thinking, from the absolute stillness, that the stones of the pavement have been put to silence by the art-magic of Mr. Macadam.
But notwithstanding all this, the Winter Theatres, having permitted their Summer rivals to play to empty benches for nearly three months, now put in their claim to share this pleasing privilege, lest it should be supposed that they too cannot afford to lose a hundred pounds a night as well as their inferiors. Accordingly, every body can have orders now (except those who ask for them); and the pit is the only place for those who are above sitting on the same bench with their boot-maker.
Let us not forget to add, that there is one part of London which is never out of season, and is never more in season than now. Covent Garden Market is still the Garden of Gardens; and as there is not a month in all the year in which it does not contrive to belie something or other that has been said in the foregoing pages, as to the particular season of certain flowers, fruits, &c. so now it offers the flowers and the fruits of every season united. How it becomes possessed of all these, I shall not pretend to say: but thus much I am bound to add by way of information,—that those ladies and gentlemen who have country houses in the neighbourhood of Clapham Common or Camberwell Grove, may now have the pleasure of eating the best fruit out of their own Gardens—provided they choose to pay the price of it in Covent Garden Market!
OCTOBER.
They tell us, in regard to this voyage of ours, called Human Life, that