TWO BOOKS ON LONDON.*

IT is well known that for some years before his death the late Sir Walter Besant was engaged upon a new survey of London.

Many assistants were working with him, and the great project is still going forward. Meanwhile Lady Besant has published her husband's social history of the eighteenth century in a separate volume, since the task was practically complete and its author was satisfied with it. A handsome and very inter- esting book is the result, for which the curious reader and the student will alike be grateful.

For the purposes of the student it would perhaps have been better had Sir Walter Besant taken a fixed date, say 1750, throughout. A century is a long period, with so many changes of fashion in it, that it is almost impossible in a short chapter to deal adequately with any aspect. The habits of 1701 were in very many cases not those of 1800, yet both dates are in the eighteenth century; and while in one chapter Sir Walter has illustrated his point from the records of the earlier year, he will, maybe, in the next resort to the later. As a matter of fact, 1800 in the social life of England meant nothing. It was a mere arbitrary landmark happening to complete a hundred years. The interesting period in the social life of England was rather 1830, when railways were coming in, and everything, including the throne, was on the eve of change. Hence a progressive study of English or Metropolitan life from 1730 to 1830 would be of more value and interest than a collection of mixed and tangential information such as this, belonging to any dates between the last years of the seventeenth century and the earliest years of the nineteenth. One thing, however, is certain : that if the social historian arises to write such a book, his task will have been sensibly lightened by Sir Walter Besant's researches.

The present work is rather an ample essay than a social history ; or, to be more precise, rather the sketch or notes for an essay than the essay itself. Some of the chapters are, we imagine, not quite as their author would have sent them forth ; he has not always drawn his conclusions from the materials brought together. But the work is always vivid, always illuminative, and though certain portions may seem to be unduly thin, the cumulative effect is satisfying and very pleasant Sir Walter Besant's manner comes between that of Lord Macaulay on the one hand and of Mr. Austin Dobson on the other. He has not the glittering fine free way of the historian of the Stuarts, nor the patient minuteness of the

author of the Eighteenth Century Vignettes ; but be has an authentic entertaining style of his own, as readers of his historical novels have good reason to know, and it is no dis-

advantage to a book of this kind that its author has been a novelist. We get a broader treatment of the human passages, a better sense of drama, than might otherwise be the ease.

Dangers there may be. Indeed, more than once we fear that Sir Walter Besant's picturesque breadth of touch has betrayed him into too sweeping generalities. Thus, in the chapter on Police and Justice, he says, in connection with his description of the inn-yards and the arrival of a coach :—

"As soon as the passengers had left the vehicle, down came the coachman and climbed into the inside, shutting the door after him, while he searched the pockets and the seats for stray articles left behind. They were his perquisite; no subsequent inquiry after lost property ever recovered things once left behind. Mean- 'time the passengers' luggage lay on the ground waiting for the porters and hackney coach. Here was the chance for the thieves. One caught up a trunk, shouting, 'By your leave,' as if be was the porter bearing the box to a coach, and made for the gates. At the gates stood two or three of his confederates, to hustle and knock down any one who ran after the thief, who, once outside, was instantly lost in the narrow lanes of the City. This robbery of luggage went on all day long, always in the same manner; almost always with impunity."

Surely things were not quite so bad as that Even in the • (1.) London in the Eighteenth Century. By Sir Walter Besant. A. and C. Black. I. net.]—(2.) Highways and Byways.in London, E. T. Cook. London: Macmillan and CO. Loal

London:

By BM

eighteenth century there must have, been persons who learned by experience, if not by precept. Sir Walter Besant's picture of this unvarying robbery reminds us of Mr. Reed's "Pre- historic Peeps" and the refusal of the antediluviana ever to realise that where there were rocks and caves there were probably—nay, certainly—mammoths. Again, Sir Walter writes in the same chapter:—" The inn yards were also the haunt of the smasher.' Everybody was a smasher." A society in which " everybody " is a "smasher" can be realised only by a humourist of Mr. Gilbert's turn of mind, or by the author of the famous joke about the means of subsistence of the inhabitants of the Scilly Islands.

These passages of too generous description are, perhaps, trivial blemishes, but they do, we think, impair the value of the book to some extent by giving a false impression. Our ancestors cannot have been as wholly hawks and pigeons as Sir Walter would have us believe. One more example,—the description of a felon in the dock, suffering from gaol fever :—

" He brought into the court with him a most dreadful reek or stench of the place whence he had been taken. It was the feverish breath of the gaol which spoke through him, crying, 'This is the air that your prisoners have to breathe. In this they have to live as long as your hangman lets them live. This is the deadly breath of Newgate: As it rolled in invisible waves about the court; as it crept like a November fog from bench to bench, and covered, now the barristers, now the clerks, and lastly the

Bench, every one in turn shivered and shuddered The wretch whose life was to be taken away by force of law might console himself with the thought that he would not die un- avenged ; for the smell of him was charged with pestilence, and those who looked upon him in life to-day might stand beside him in the other world to-morrow, hurried away by the reek of prison?'

We cannot help feeling that this also is an exaggerated picture. Were the ranks of the Bar decimated after every

trial, as one would imagine from this account? Did no Judge (men being as self-protective then as flow: these things do not change) insist on a disinfecting process for prisoners between cell and dock ? The passage reminds us of a novel of Sir Walter Besant's (The Children of Gibeon, we think) in which two sparrows, flying past an open window in the East End, fall dead from the noxious air that is emerging. If we recollect rightly, there was no illness in the room : it was just Sir Walter's heightened way of saying that the conditions of Ivy Lane, Hoxton, were insanitary.

It is not, perhaps, fair to subject to minute criticism a work which has lacked the final revision of its author, but we may point without prejudice to a few chapters where fuller infor- mation would bare been valuable and interesting. In that on the Post Office, for example, it would have been well had a table been given to show the cost of sending letters to various towns. In the chapter called "The Daily Life" the manners of a shopkeeper in the eighteenth century would have been admirably illustrated by a passage from the essay on society appended to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. The list of daily papers on pp. 393-94 should have been furnished with dates.

Most of the papers there mentioned Only just came into the eighteenth century. On p. 428 Dr. Johnson's habit of going behind the scenes to talk with the actresses is mentioned ; Sir Walter Besant might, we think, have added the philosopher's renunciation of that pleasure on account of its inflammatory character. In the chapters on sports and pastimes there is no mention of cricket; yet important matches were played in the White Conduit Fields and the Artillery Ground near Finsbury Square in the middle of the century, and Lord, a Scotchman, opened a cricket ground where Dorset Square now stands, in 1787, and there provided modern cricket with what was practically its birthplace. This was the original Lord's Ground. Cricket certainly should have some notice in this book. But, after all, in an essay we look rather for a general impression than exhaustive detail, and Sir Walter Besant's book gives an admirable impression of the times. It would also make a perfect foundation for the grangeriser.

So much for the London of the past. To London of the present day we come in the new volume of Messrs.

Macmillan's agreeable "Highways and Byways Series." It was a happy (and not too obvious) thought to add

London to their series, and the choice of Mrs. E. T. Cook was no less fortunate, for she has an easy, pleasant style, and brings wide reading and a great love of her subject to the task. Her book is, of course, no more than a sketch, so vast is the theme, so considerable the bulk of London literature that might be drawn upon,—we might call it a primer or introduc-

tion to the study of the capital; but, given the lines on which this series is planned, it could not as a sketch well be better.

These lines, decided upon for the convenience of the traveller and stranger, to some extent, of course, by their very thoroughness, defeat individuality in a book. An independent author, for example, treating of London, would. describe only what interested him, and leave the rest, thus providing in his pages a guide not only to our great city, but also to his own taste and character. Mrs. Cook having perforce to touch more or less upon every London landmark, has deprived her book of much of this personal character. But as a friendly companion for provincials or Americans wandering in London it is almost all that it could be.

Opportunities for fine writing are scarce, and indeed fine writing would be beside the mark ; but we may quote the following passage as an example of Mrs. Cook at her most imaginative :— "How interesting would it be if one could only—by the aid of some Mr. Wells's Time Machine '—take a series of flying leaps backward into the abysm of time! Strange to imagine the ex- perience ! Beauty, one reflects, might be gained at nearly, every step, at the expense, alas ! of sanitary conditions, knowledge, and utility. Let us for a moment imagine how the thing would be. First, in a few rapid revolutions of the wheel, woUld:dis- appear the hideous criss-cross of electric wires overhead, the ugly tangle of suburban tram-lines, and the greater part of the hideous modern growth of suburbs Another whirl of the machine, and every sign of a railway station would disappear, every repul- sive engine-shed and siding vanish . . . . . . while -the dull present-day rumble of the Metropolis would give place to a more indescribably acute and agonising medley of sound Again a little while and the hideous early Victorian buildings would disappear, making way for white Stuart facades, or sober red- brick Dutch palaces With yet a few more revolutions, the Metropolis will shrink into inconceivably small dimensions, and the atmosphere of the City, losing its peculiar blue-grey.mist, will gradually brighten and clear—a radiance, unknown to us children of a later day—diffusing itself over the glistening towers and domes, no longer blackened, but gleaming, Venetian-like, in

the Tudor sunlight The aspect of the river, too, has changed; no more ugly steamers, but an array of princelybarges deck its waters gay with the bright dresses of ladies and gallants.

Its solid embankments have crumbled to picturesque overgrown mud banks, its many bridges shrunk to one ; the little separate towns of London' and 'Westminster' presenting now more the appearance of rambling villages adorned by some, palaces and churches Another turn of the machine, and lo ! the

un- posing facades that adorned the Strand have in their turn given way to picturesque rows and streets of overhanging gabled houses with blackened crass-beams, their quaint projecting windows

almost meeting over the narrow streets stony streets, with their crowds of noisy, jostling foot-passengers Again a long pause and now the scene changes to Roman London, the ancient Augusta,' with its powerful walls, its slave ships and pinnaces, its mailed warriors, ever in arms against the blue-eyed Saxon marauders. Then—a final interval—and we See the primitive British village, its mud huts erected by the kindly shores of our Father Thames, their smoke peacefully rising heavenwards above the surrounding marshes and forests.'

For the most part Mrs. Cook, when not strictly topographical or historical, has permitted others to speak for her, almost every page containing a quotation from a well-known writer on London. This also is in accordance with the traditions of the series. We must congratulate Mrs. Cook on the variety of her selections. Occasionally she seems to have missed an

opportunity: as when, for example, she mentions Birch's in Cornhill, and omits to say that Birch's locus classicus in litera- ture is in Mr. Meredith's One of Our Conquerors. It was there that Victor Radnor and Simeon Fenellan shared the Old Veuve. And Disraeli, we think, should have been drawn upon more freely,—especially his lyrical outburst on the glories of Bond Street in the early morning. But this is merely a matter of preference : our own against Mrs. Cook's.

We have noticed a few slips. Humphrey Clinker is attri- buted to Fielding on p. 319; on p. 139 the story of Charles Lamb is very inaccurately given. The author of the us- attributed verses on p. 238 is Mr. Wilfred Whitten, the editor of London in Song, an excellent collection of London poems, to which Mrs. Cook has been, we fancy, much indebted.

Take it altogether, however, as we have said, Mrs. Cook has made a very entertaining and informing volume, notable not only for what it says of London, but, as should be the case, especially in such a series as this, notable also for the London appetite, the City gusto, which it excites. For the illustrations we have less praise. Mr. Griggs'

architectural drawings are clever : his "St. Paul's from the River" (p. 87) is interesting ; and he has rendered the smoked surface of the London stone with curious fidelity, particu- larly, perhaps, in St. Michael's, Paternoster Royal, on p. 96; but his choice of scenes is disappointing, and he has been per- mitted to give far too few. A book such as this should have drawings of all the principal London buildings, instead of an unrepresentative few chosen apparently at random. The other illustrator, Mr. Hugh Thomson, has been far more copious, Mr. Thomson is charming when he is drawing illustrations to old hunting songs or to Cranford; but be fails altogether as a delineator of modern Londoners. There is not a Londoner in this book; the old men, boys, and young women whom we meet, page after page, are pure country, provincials every one. Mr. Thomson's pictures have life and spirit and fun, but they are not London.