THE man who comes to London and is driven around in a hansom, or a carriage, as most tourists are, and sees only the museums and art galleries, the botanical and zoological gardens, the monuments and statues, the costly cathedrals and splendid temples, the lordly mansions and the superb palaces, of the city, leaves with a false, imperfect, distorted, and one-sided idea of the place. I would advise no man to come here, and leave, without visiting Westminister Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, without going to St. Paul’s Cathedral, to the Tower, and a dozen other places of general interest, “where travelers do most congregate.” These things one should see, as a matter of course, but other things should not be left unseen.
I love to study architecture, art and literature; I love to study poetry and science; but, above all, I love to study man.
Some years ago, I saw a gentleman in Queen’s College, Toronto, Canada, who received a good salary from the government to study cat-fish. Men spend many years and much money in studying birds. And is not one fish sold for a penny, and two sparrows for a farthing? Man is of more value than many fishes and sparrows. Then, why not study man? Nor is it enough to study men individually; but we must study them collectively as well. And, for this collective study of mankind, there is no better place to be found anywhere beneath the shining stars than the city of London.
As I sit alone in my room to-night, my conscience hurting me for disobeying the counsels of a devoted mother in keeping this late hour, and look down upon the “life circulation” of the city, I realize that it is true sublimity to dwell here. “I am listening to the stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest. I hear the chariot wheels of vanity rolling here and there, bearing her on to distant streets, to halls roofed in, and lighted to the true pitch for folly. Vice and misery are roaming, prowling, mourning in the streets, like night-birds turned loose in the forest.
“The high and the low are here, the joyful and the sorrowful are here; men are dying here; men are being born; men are praying—on the other side of the brick partition, men are cursing; around them is all the vast void of night. The proud grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons or reposes within damask curtains. Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers, hungerstricken, into its lair of straw. In obscure cellars, squalid poverty languidly emits its voice of destiny to haggard, hungry villains, while landlords sit as counsellors of state, plotting and playing their high chess game, whereof the pawns are men.”
THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT.
“The blushing maiden, listening to whisperings of love, is urged to trust him who, in all probability, seeks to rob her of that crown of glory without which woman is indeed a ‘poor thing.’ A thousand gin palaces are open, and are at this moment crowded with drinking and drunken men and women—perhaps far less of males than of females. Gay mansions with supper rooms and dancing halls are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts. But, in yonder condemned cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint. The sleepless and blood-shot eyes look through the darkness that is around and within for the last stern morning. Full three millions of two-legged animals lie around us in horizontal positions, their heads in night-caps and their hearts full of foolish dreams. Riot cries aloud and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame.”