the traveller, who has walked through miry ways to his railroad-station, arrives in London, and sees the boots of those who are fresh from their suburban villas brighter by contrast. He no longer is propitiated by 'Clean your honour's shoes,' but he hears Clean your boots.' Practical benevolence has found out its ragged boys; has clothed them in a decent scarlet livery; and established them in public thoroughfares, with the foot-rest and the brush. And, indeed, the vast accumulation of public vehicles has

made the shoe-black sometimes as necessary to the passenger who has hurried across the busy road, careless of mud so that he save his limbs, as the old neglect. The great thoroughfares cannot now be adequately swept; and even a sunny day has its dirt, through the indefatigable water-cart. 'The black youth' again thrives.

He who would see London well must be a pedestrian. Gay who has left us the most exact as well as the most lively picture of the external London of a hundred and

twenty years ago, is enthusiastic in his preference for walking:

Let others in the jolting coach confide,

Or in the leaky boat the Thames divide,

Or, box'd within the chair, contemn the street,

And trust their safety to another's feet:

Still let me walk.'

But what a walk has he described! He sets out-as what sensible man would not? with his feet protected with 'firm, well-hammer'd soles;' but if the shoe be too big,

Each stone will wrench th' unwary step aside.'

This, we see, is a London without trottoirs. The middle of a paved street was generally occupied with the channel; and the sides of the carriage-way were full of absolute holes, where the rickety coach was often stuck as in a quagmire. Some of the leading streets, even to the time of George II., were almost as impassable as the avenues of a new American town. The only road to the Houses of Parliament before 1750 was through King Street and Union Street, which were in so miserable a state, that fagots were thrown into the ruts on the days on which the King went to Parliament, to render the passage of the statecoach more easy. * The present Saint Margaret's Street was formed out of a thoroughfare known as Saint Margaret's Lane, which was so narrow that 'pales were obliged to be placed, four feet high, between the foot-path and the coach-road, to preserve the passengers from injury, and from being covered with the mud which was splashed on all sides in abundance.'t The pales here preserved the passengers more effectually than the posts of other thoroughfares. These posts, in the principal avenues, constituted the only distinction between the foot-way and carriageway; for the space within the posts was as uneven as the space without. This inner space was sometimes so narrow, that only one person could pass at a time; and hence those contests for the wall that filled the streets with the vocife† Id. p. 262.

* Smith's Westminster, p. 261.

rations of anger, and the din of assaulting sticks, and sometimes the clash of naked steel. Dr. Johnson describes how those quarrels were common when he first came to London; and how at length things were better ordered. But the change must in great part be imputed to the gradual improvement of the streets. In Gay's time there was no

safety but within the posts.

'Though expedition bids, yet never stray

Where no ranged posts defend the rugged way:

Here laden carts with thundering waggons meet,

Wheels clash with wheels, and bar the narrow street.'

In wet and gusty weather the unhappy walker heard the crazy signs swinging over his head, as Gulliver describes the Red Lion of Brentford. The spouts of every house were streaming at his feet, or drenching his laced hat and his powdered wig with unpitying torrents. At every step some bulk or shop-projection narrowed the narrow road, and drove him against the coach-wheels. The chairmen, if there was room to pass, occupied all the space between the wall and the posts. The hooded maid' came sometimes gingerly along, with pattens and umbrella (then exclusively used by women), and of courtesy he must yield the wall. The small-coal man, and the sweep, and the barber, took the wall, in assertion of their clothes-soiling prerogative; and the bully thrust him, or was himself thrust, to the muddy kennel's side.' The great rule for the pedestrian was,

'Ever be watchful to maintain the wall.'

The dignity of the wall, and its inconveniences, were as old as the time of James and Charles. Donne, in his first satire, describes the difficulties of one who took the wall:

'Now we are in the street; he first of all,
Improvidently proud, creeps to the wall,
And so, imprisoned and hemmed in by me,
Sells for a little state his liberty.'

The streets, in the good old times, often presented obstructions to the pedestrian which appear to us like the

wonders of some unknown region. In the more recent unhappy days of public executions the wayfarer passed up Ludgate Hill with an eye averted from the Old Bailey; for there, as Monday morning came, duly hung some three, and it may be six, unhappy victims of a merciless code, judicially murdered according to our better notions. Then was the rush to see the horrid sight, and the dense crowd pouring away from it; and the pickpocket active under the gallows; and the business of life interrupted for a quarter of an hour, with little emotion even amongst the steady walkers who heeded not the spectacle: it was a thing of course. And so was the pillory in earlier times. Gay says nothing of the feelings of the passer-on; he had only to take care of his clothes :

:

'Where, elevated o'er the gaping crowd,

Clasp'd in the board the perjur'd head is bow'd,
Betimes retreat; here, thick as hailstones pour,
Turnips and half-hatch'd eggs, a mingled shower,
Among the rabble rain: some random throw

May with the trickling yolk thy cheek o'erflow.'

People used to talk of these things as coolly as Garrard wrote to Lord Strafford of them: No mercy showed to Prynne; he stood in the pillory, and lost his first ear in a pillory in the palace at Westminster in full term; his other in Cheapside, where, while he stood, his volumes were burnt under his nose, which had almost suffocated him.'* The cruelty is not mitigated by the subsequent account of Garrard, that Mr. Prynne hath got his ears sewed on that they grow again, as before, to his head.'+ If the mob round the pillory was safely passed, there was another mob often to be encountered. Rushing along Cheapside or Covent Garden, or by the Maypole in the Strand, came the foot-ball players. It is scarcely conceivable, when London had settled into civilization, little more than a century ago-when we had our famed Augustan age of Addisons and Popes,-when laced coats, and flowing wigs, and p. 261. † Id. p. 266.

* Strafford's Letters, vol. i.

silver buckles, ventured into the streets, and the beau prided himself on

The nice conduct of a clouded cane,

that the great thoroughfares through which men now move, intent on high designs,' should be a field for football:

The prentice quits his shop to join the crew;
Increasing crowds the flying game pursue.'*

This is no poetical fiction. It was the same immediately after the Restoration. D'Avenant's Frenchman thus complains of the streets of London :

:

'I would now make a safe retreat, but that methinks I am stopped by one of your heroic games, called foot-ball; which I conceive (under your favour) not very conveniently civil in the streets; especially in such irregular and narrow roads as Crooked-lane. Yet it argues your courage, much like your military pastime of throwing at cocks. But your mettle would be more magnified (since you have long allowed those two valiant exercises in the streets) to draw your archers from Finsbury, and, during high market, let them shoot at butts in Cheapside.'†

It was the same in the days of Elizabeth. To this game went the sturdy apprentices, with all the train of idlers in a motley population; and when their blood was up, as it generally was in this exercise, which Stubbes calls. 'a bloody and murthering practice, rather than a fellowly sport or pastime,' they had little heed to the passengers in the streets, whether there was passing by

'a velvet justice with a long

Great train of blue-coats, twelve or fourteen strong; ‡

or a gentle lady on her palfrey, wearing her 'visor made of velvet.'§ The courtier, described in Hall, had an awful chance to save his periwinke' in such an encounter; Entertainment at Rutland House. Donne. § Stubbes.

*Trivia.

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