LORD MAYOR'S SHOW.
IF to be admirable is to have the quality of being looked at, then the Lord Mayor's Show is admirable, and the show of Wednesday last, the most admirable that we have had these many years ; for the number of eyes directed to it was the greatest in the history of the pageant. The public and its " best possible instructors" are rather at issue on the point. The "best possible" have been condemning the show as an encumbrance to the streets, an obso- lete nonsense, which it would be well to abridge ; while the public rush towards it to assist in the encumbrance. If it is the object of institutions to promote happiness, it may be said that the Lord Mayor's show has done more for the single day of its development than many other institutions which receive more dignified ap- proval.
We have upheld the preservation of monuments, or at all events counselled much consideration in abolishing them ; and we would not depart from our rule in the present instance. Nevertheless, although the unthinking public rush to the spectacle, it is true that it is attended with inconvenience ; that it is in many respects ungenuine, and little suited to the present state of our streets and traffic. In its present form it is not even an antiquity ; and if it pleases the vulgar eye, it in some respects misleads by fantastical allegories without moral. In days when the Strand was a country- road, and when there was some memory of men in armour, the pageant was neither so inconvenient nor so entirely out of place. In the days when the general mind was less cultivated with useful knowledge, allegories of California and Australia were not so transparently absurd. Public opinion must now have some defer- ence for shopkeepers whose custom is arrested, and for cities whose taste is outraged. Corporation-reform is invited to attack this great piece de resistance, the Lord Mayor's Show. No doubt, there may be pleas for it. However irritating to the man of business that his cab should be arrested for half an hour or more in medias res, there is something to be said for the ob- struction. Depraved as it may be from its original form, adulterated by admixture with Astley's, and by departure from the staple of civic imagination, there is in it some portion of monumental remi- niscence. True that it is the least convenient of our monuments. The statues and cenotaphs in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's do not accustom themselves to take a walk along the streets col- lectively, or we might find them as inconvenient as the Lord Mayor and his friends. But it is only once a year we have this grand promenade of monuments. Genuine or spurious, wise or foolish, the best of all pleas for the show is that it is a gratification to large numbers. Perhaps the practical precept to be arrived at is, that the pa- geant if not abolished should be retrenched ; that the hand of reform could curtail its spurious and modern supererogation, while the finger of common sense should point out the shortest and most convenient route for it, with more speed in its pace. Concentrated, abbreviated, and expedited, it may still be a pageant for the plea- sure of a day, and cease to encumber the commerce of the Metro- polis by the hinderance of a day.
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