nothing else to do than surrender himself at discretion to whatever author tickles his fancy or his sentiment; only it is better to surrender to a man of some genius and nobleness of mind than to a blockhead or a bigot. And therefore all such a one will have to do, will be to be careful of making choice of the best authors; and, as a general rule to go with an historian when he praises and magnifies the men, actions, principles, and parties he is endeavouring to set forth to the admiration of mankind, and to withhold from him your sympathy and judgment when he falls into a humour of condemnation; for love is more quick-sighted than hate, and for one instance of unmerited praise you may find ten instances of undeserved censure.

424

ANCIENT LONDON.

'ONE generation passeth away and another cometh '-so comes, so occupies the place of its predecessor, so passes again into oblivion, that neither the memory nor the imagination can bring it back, except in its faintest and feeblest outlines. Carry your thoughts back to the last generation, the last hundred years; what do we know of them? Are they not as far off from us, and far beyond our reach, as much faded into the dim past, as if, instead of being our immediate predecessors, they had drifted away from us, on the stream of time, ages and ages ago? Take this great city, for instance, and strip it of the things which have grown up in and about it during the last hundred years; reinvest it with its old fashions and customs; try by a trick of the imagination to put it back again into what it was in the days of George III.-and that is not very far-and what a strange place it seems! how far removed from our present notions and conceptions! how utterly impossible does it seem to us that it could ever have existed at all in such a shape! A lady, some little time ago, who had carefully preserved her wedding costume, showed me the bonnet in which she was married. She was a lady of some wealth, and her costume was made by the most fashionable milliner. Of the dress she wore, the bonnet was considered as profoundly elegant; it was precisely in the style of a coal-scuttle, and

A lecture delivered at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street.

protruded three feet at least from the face. You may have seen such bonnets in old pictures. I have; and have thought they were caricatures. But though the thing was before you, it was impossible to credit one's eyes; you could not believe that such a dress had ever been possible, that it would not have led to a thousand inconveniences, and been immediately abandoned. And so it is with all old fashions and uses. Instead of belonging to the lady I saw before me, instead of having been part of the veritable dress of one not much older than myself, it might have belonged to a female of the Anglo-Saxons, or some British chieftain when Cæsar invaded these shores.

Well; now think of London in its old-fashioned condition sixty years or a hundred years ago, and you experience similar feelings of vagueness and impossibility. Strip it of its gaslights and policemen, and recall the dim oil-lamps and sleepy watchmen, the miry, ill-paved streets; the straggling suburbs, when ladies and gentlemen went backwards and forwards to Hampstead and Shepherd's Bush under protection of an armed escort. Bring back the days of the old stagecoaches, when all the conveyances that existed for transporting the inhabitants of this huge metropolis from town to country consisted of a couple of dozen or so of stage-carriages carrying four inside and ten out. Why, a single Brighton excursion train now conveys more passengers at one journey than all the mails combined did in their four-and-twenty hours of sixty years ago. Cram back into those couple of dozen stage-coaches all the travelling and locomotion of these days. It seems impossible for the world to have got on at all with such a state of things.

Or to take a nearer instance. This house, this room for example, sixty or a hundred years ago. Shut your eyes, and fill it once more with its old inhabitants. Then it was a most fashionable mansion, in the extreme West End, sur

rounded with notability and nobility; the Belgrave Square of the eighteenth century. Fancy it on some gala or reception day, filled with gentlemen; ay, in this room, sipping their coffee, or engaged in a game of ombre. It may be that some one or more of the party have ridden over that day to Hyde Park Corner, to where the Marble Arch now stands, to see some Jack Sheppard or Jonathan Wild drawn along in semi-triumph through Oxford Street-then a flaunting and irregular suburb- to make his exit at Tyburn; and here they are discussing the events and perils of the day. Was there ever a more useless or ridiculous costume? Powdered wigs, knee-breeches, silk stockings, long ruffles and shoes. Here is a gentleman whose whole ingenuity for a month past has been expended in contriving and adjusting the curls of his wig; here is another in plum-coloured satin coat and peach-coloured small-clothes, talking to his neighbour in colours equally bright and varied. Here a third is grinding the high-backed chair on which he is sitting with the hilt of his diamond-studded sword. One is astonished how the gentlemen of those days could have taken the air at all. Their silk and satin dresses would not keep them warm or fence off the weather; their three-cornered hats, not made for the head but the hand, afforded no protection from the rain, or from the long gutters and water-spouts, which shot their contents from the roofs of the soaking houses into the streets below, on the heads of unwary passengers.

Then those wigs! worn universally by all classes, high or low. No matter how poor the man, or how low his finances, a wig was indispensable. No citizen on a Sunday, no clerk, no skilful mechanic, would think of appearing without this appendage. He would just as soon have thought of walking about in his nightcap, or in no clothes at all, as show himself abroad without his wig. Those were the days when barbers flourished; when the spruce apprentice brought home his

master's wig carefully suspended on a species of light block, with its last puff of powder and last turn of the curls, ready for church on the Sunday morning. Ah! those wigs, what consternation did they make among the ladies! How many a rich widow, how many a proud heiress, whom no sighs, no protestations could move, yielded to the charms of a handsome wig! The barbers were the most important men in England. Nay, so universal was the fashion, so indispensable was this ornament, that, as I have heard my father say, it gave rise to a particular occupation; and on the Saturday evenings, when men had left their work, and they were thinking of their Sunday dress, and their wives of their Sunday dinners, Jews used to go about the streets with bags full of wigs, crying out, 'A dip for a penny.' That is, every one who paid a penny dipped his hand in the bag and took his chance of the first wig that came up. It would happen that the man fished up a wig too big or too small, or a blackhaired man got a red wig, or the reverse; or a most outrageous fit, in which no decent citizen or artisan could appear. Why, then he gave another penny and dipped again; and no doubt in this as in all other lotteries, he found more blanks than prizes. In those days wigs afforded great temptations to thieves. In the ill-lighted streets the gentleman returning from the theatre, or from a carouse― for men were not very temperate then-was a rich prize; if he had gambled away his money, his wig was more valuable than his watch. A brawny fellow, sometimes with two or three more, is passing by with a basket at his back; he seems a gardener or porter on his way to Covent Garden Market-the great centre of public amusements. In this basket a little boy is concealed, who suddenly clutches at the wig of the unsuspecting passer-by, and wig and boy disappear in a moment. These things look like fables; they are facts of a past age, not far removed. If we cannot realise them, it is