Martins contained only one hundred persons who were liable for poor rates. West of this was the open country, where now stands St. James, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, Regent Street and the West-end quarter. The present fashionable Mayfair was distinguished as a dairy farm, and the region of Dover street and Berkeley square was famous for game. Oxford street, then known as Tyburn road, lay through a country district, of which Pennant wrote about the middle of the last century: "I remember Oxford street a deep, hollow road and full of sloughs, with here and there a ragged house the lurking place of cut throats; insomuch that I was never taken that way by night, in my hackney coach, to a worthy Uncle's who gave me lodgings in George's street, but I went in dread the whole way." What a contrast to the brilliant Oxford street of to day. A hundred years ago the inhabitants of Kensington, intending to visit London during the evening, collected in large numbers and marched in a body for defence and mutual protection. The managers of theatres in Islington announced in their play-bills, "A horse patrol will be sent in the new road to-night for the protection of the nobility and gentry who go from the squares at the end of the town." It was not considered safe to cross Lincoln's Inn Fields on a dark night, or Hounslow heath after dark. The streets were badly lit with oil burners. So much so that links were carried before carriages and foot passengers as late as 1805, and these linkmen and boys were amongst the most numerous and disorderly classes of London. Bethnel Green and Spital-fields were in 1805 rural districts. Now they are probably the most populous districts of London, and there are miles of spacious streets in even these, which are considered the most inferior town quarters. What is true of them is equally true of the districts south of the river, as far as Dulwich and Camberwell, now a dense mass of human dwellings extending in all directions. In the 17th century this was simply a wild and unenclosed tract of semi-swamp land. In the 17th century the river Fleet ran between Temple bar and Ludgate Hill, flowing into the Thames near Blackfriar's Bridge. Barges sailed up this stream to discharge their cargoes at Holborn hill. In the course of time the Fleet became a nuisance, nothing more than an offensive sewer, and was covered in, and is now one of the main underground drains. On the north, the present district of Moorfields was simply what its name be speaks, a moor or fen. So was the present site of Finsbury, which takes its name from the Fens on which it is built and which were first drained in 1527. Few houses were built of brick previous to the great fire in 1666; there were some few built however between 1616 and 1636. The most interesting of those are in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Covent Gardens, Great Queen street, St. Martin's lane and Aldersgate street. The best specimen of old English domestic architecture in the city is Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate street, which was erected of stone and timber in the 15th century. When built it was considered the finest house in London, and is full of historic interest, being referred to by Shakespeare as the residence of Richard III. After the great fire, the city was rapidly rebuilt and . extended westward, but as late as 1708 the papers spoke of Sir Robert Walpole when minister, thus: "The right Honorable Premier comes to town this day from Chelsea.' It takes less time now to reach London from the sea coast at Brighton or Hastings! Notwithstanding the already gigantic proportions of London, it is annually increasing at the rate of 80,000, and for many miles after leaving what is technically known as the Metropolis, it is difficult to define where the country begins and the town ends. The everlasting tide of brick and mortar rolls on, covering fields, parks, towns and villages. Silent villages, sleepy hamlets are obliterated by masonry; fields and parks are mapped out into squares, crescents and streets, shops, public houses, cab and omnibus stands, school houses, churches and suburban residences appear, and the country becomes incorporated into the town-an embodied part of the great city. There seems to be no limit to its growth, while the country advances in wealth and prosperity, unless it be presented in the obstacle to which Charles I. alluded -the inability of all means of transportation to bring the population food. This difficulty may paralyze its growth; it does not appear that any other is likely to do so. Good dwelling houses for the poor, spacious streets, squares and parks, an abundant supply of pure water, thorough drainage, will keep off plague and pestilence--can railways and steamboats prevent famine? Having given the reader, briefly, a tolerable idea of London, without encumbering the account with figures, we shall have occasion in subsequent pages to make him acquainted with the metropolis in other aspects, and give him a glimpse of its social condition and of some of the subdivisions of its mixed population, their modes of life, manners and customs and actual condition. We will not say that those who have not seen London have seen nothing, but they have failed to see a great and curious spectacle. Under its one aspect of magnificence it is without a rival in modern times, and in its other of degredation, poverty and crime it undoubtedly surpasses all other cities - ancient or modern. In the West-end, the rallying point of its rank and wealth, it is gayer, brighter, more resplendent with fashion, glitter and gold than even Paris, and in its remoter districts sad and dull without a parallel. Whatever pretense of life lingers about these regions is highly suggestive of still-life, if not of death itself, which renders them more truly appalling, more ghastly than Pompeii. CHAPTER II. THE DARK SIDE OF LONDON LIFE. THE SOCIAL DREGS. Having in the preceding chapter presented a general idea of outside London, we shall introduce the reader in this to some interior views. He will not see in them the most pleasing, interesting or popular aspects of metropolitan life, but there are plenty of writers who riot in descriptions of the beau monde, by which we mean the world of fashion, for neither wit nor learning are elements in it. On the other hand the number is small indeed, of those who are willing to take the less attractive, not to say revolting part, of portraying scenes where vice wears no veil and decency forever blushes. Let it be our part, at least, to touch upon them. During a long residence in London, the author gathered the information embodied in this chapter from various sources and by personal visits to the haunts of the destitute, and the dens of thieves. He was sometimes accompanied by a clergyman of the District, but more frequently by a brace of well armed policemen. The scenes disclosed to him deepened his convictions that London forms no exception to the rule that sunshine may fall upon the earth and bless it, but the shadow is ever at its side. To know London you must see both sides of the picture --its dens of misery its regions of squalid poverty and perennial suffering, as well as its West-end mansions and shops, its noble squares and extensive parks. Prominent as is the mighty Babylon of our day for its wealth and grandeur, it is equally disgraced by its exceptionable regions of poverty which excite pity, and of crime which awaken fear. While it is undeniably a pleasant thing to contemplate man in all the exaltation of his wisdom and virtue, it is also of service to us to occasionally look into his obliquities and to distinctly remark how great and portentious are his follies, his crimes and his sufferings. Penetrate into remote quarters, and you find behind the smiling exterior of West-end wealth and splendor, masses of miserable, over-crowded houses, immured, as it were, in close and narrow streets, from which narrower alleys radiate, where the sun never peeps and broad daylight is never seen; swarms of poverty stricken people, pale with grief and suffering, emaciated, toiling men and women, by the side of beggars and thieves, and all maintaining a desperate struggle with want-literally fighting for life. No belle, glittering with jewels, rolls in her coach to the Queen's Drawing room without startling the ear of dying poverty in some hovel of wretchedness and despair. No gaily dressed congregation reaches its fashionable church without encountering the fumes of taprooms and gin palaces, and mixing with their crowd of squalid, drunken customers. Thus is exemplified the truth: "Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The Royal Palace has its disgusting back-ground of reeking sinks, slums and hovels in Pimlico. The opera has its counterpart in the low, vice engendering penny theatre, and the balls of the aristocracy are set off by the costermonger's two-penny hop. The fine shops of Regent street and Piccadilly draw their supplies of silks and rich stuffs from the poverty stricken dens of Spitalfields. The gayest and most brilliant streets of the West-end are close upon St. Giles, the darkest London haunt of crime and misery. Hordes of beings rise every morning without as much food as will serve them through the day, and who derive a precarious existence by sweeping the crossings, selling matches, gathering bones or rags, riddling cinders out of dust holes, retailing apples or oranges, collecting and selling the refuse vegetables of the markets, running errands, and, worst of all, girls selling their perishing charms for the wherewithal to buy bread and meat.-The stranger dreams not of these things when sauntering through Piccadilly or Pall Mall, where a beggar is rarely seen, and the panorama of which is but a successive procession of prosperous industry and superfluous wealth. The moral geologist of London however, can map out the localities of the different classes, each having its haunt, as clearly as the physical geologist does the chalk and clay, marl and gravel deposits of any given section of country. Each of these localities is known to them. They can point in an instant to the retreat of the burglars, the shop lifters, the coiners, the dog stealers, the pick-pockets, the garroters, the murderers, the house burners, the hiding places of the infamous generally, where no policeman dare venture alone. The spots where are gathered the social dregs, the lees, the offscourings of the great city, the Pariahs, outcasts and outlaws, whose hands like the hand of Ishmael, are against the world. Formerly one of the most notorious of all these haunts was St. Giles, one of Dickens' favorite resorts for studying low life and obtaining materials for his inimitable sketches. St. Giles was, however, broken up by the extension of Oxford street through its heart, The inhabitants did not cease to exist, and the army of beggars, knackers, thieves and murderers, thus unhoused, settled down and crammed themselves in the district about Saffron Hill and Smithfield, a region where are still seen, as in Hogarth's day, over gin sellers' doors, "Drunk here for one penny, dead drunk for two pence, and clean straw for nothing." Not even is it safe for the clergyman to enter this district without police attendance. In some parts it is a huge bagnio, in others a thieves' caravansary; in others are ware-houses of stolen goods and manufacturies of decaying poisonous food; the whole district being a sink of nau seating stenches and moral putridity. But it is not in such outlaying districts alone that masses of human beings are huddled together in filthy courts and alleys.— The Royal Palace is close upon the sinks and stews of Pimlico, the streets of bagnios and the dens of thieves who are the tenants of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. Eaton Square, in famed Belgravia, closely adjoins one of the still worse drained and most squalid parts of the West end. All around Westminster Abbey are reeking rockeries, under the very noses of the lawgivers of the land. This is equally true of the fashionable quarter of Regent street-it lies in the midst of rookeries, filled with human beings for whom modern civilization and progress has done absolutely nothing. The largest and finest streets and quarters, indeed London over, have their back ground of wretchedness. In these favored localities the fine buildings are but screens for misery behind them, which shocks the mind and from which men avert their gaze. In too many cases industrious, hard working families are huddled together in a single room, a sitting room by day, and by night a bed-chamber. Many spots like Agar's Town have been squatted upon, and it is found impossible to remove the squalid inhabitants. The ground is undrained, houses foul, the streets filthy, water scarce and a clean life impossible. It is the same case in the minories, Shoreditch, Whitechapel, Wapping, |