There fled the noblest spirit'-the most pure, Of Nature the great mother. Ev'n in life, And vulgar decencies begirt thee round; The shame it was- the crying, crushing shame, The love that over all created things Should be diffusive as the atmosphere. Then did thy boundless tenderness expand Over all space -all animated things, And things inanimate. Thou hadst a heart, Stranded and gasping-ripped up for his blubber, * Pretty little playful Patty Little brother Johnny made ye, Che Night Walker.* 'Midnight! yet not a nose, from Tower Hill to Piccadilly, snored!" IN a crowded and highly cultivated state of society, like that of London, the race of exertion against time is incessant. Take a distant village, although a populous one, (as in Devonshire or Cornwall,) and even discord, during the hours of darkness, is found forgetting herself in rest. The last alehouse closes before the clock strikes ten, sending the very scapegraces of the hamlet, in summer, to bed by daylight; no lady would choose, after curfew hour, (even by beating her husband,) to disturb her neighbours; and, unless some tailor happens to be behindhand with a wedding pair of small clothes; or some housewife prolongs the washing-day, and gives an extra hour to her lace caps; or unless the village be a Post-stage, where the "first-turn-boy" must sleep in his spurs; or where, the mail changing horses, some one sits up to give the guard his glass of rum, no movable probably like a lighted candle is known to such a community from eleven o'clock on the Saturday night to six o'clock on the Monday morning. In London, however, the course of affairs is widely different. As the broad glare of gas drives darkness even from our alleys, so multitudinous avocations keep rest for ever from our streets. By an arrangement the opposite to that of Queen Penelope, it is during the night that the work of regeneration in our great capital goes on; it is by night that the great reservoirs which feed London and Westminster, repair the vast expenditure which they make during the day. As the wants of twelve hundred thousand persons are not ministered to with a wet finger, this operation of replenishment does not proceed in silence. Its action is best observable (as regards the season) towards the end of spring; when, the town being at the fullest, the markets are most abundantly supplied. Then, every succeeding hour of the four-and-twenty, brings its peculiar business to be performed, and sets its peculiar agents into motion. Between half past eleven and twelve o'clock at night, the sev* From Blackwood for November, 1823.-M. eral theatres of the metropolis discharge themselves of their loads; and at that hour it is (unless the House of Commons happens to sit late) that the last flush of pa engers is seen in the streets of London. The forth-rushing multitudes of CoventGarden and Drury-Lane pass westward, in divisions, by King Street and Leicesterfields-eastward, by Catherine Street, the Strand, and Temple Bar; they are crossed at the points of Blackfriars, and St. Martin's Lane, by the Middlesex-dwelling visitors of Astley's and the Circus, and may be distinguished from the chance travellers (pedestrians) of the same direction, by their quick step, hilarious mood, and, still more, by that style of shouldering in which Englishmen, when they walk in a body, always indulge towards the single-handed. About this time, too, the hackney horses put their best feet (where there is a choice) foremost; knowing of old, that, whence comes one lash, there as easily come two. The less public and more peaceful districts of town are next flattered for some twenty minutes by the loud knocks of coachmen, occasionally commuted into "touches of the bell," for the sake of "the lodgers," or "the children," or, sometimes, "the old lady opposite." And before the stroke of midnight, in these comparatively pacific regions, the tom-cats and the watchmen reign with undisputed sway. In the greater thoroughfares of London, however, and especially about Fleet Street and the Strand, the tumult of evening does not subside so easily. From twelve, by Paul's clock, until after two in the morning, the Gates of the Temple, and the nooks under St. Dunstan's Church; the corners of Bell Yard, Star Court, and Chancery Lane; the doors of the Rainbow, the Cock, and the other minor coffee-houses of Fleet Street, are beset by habitual idlers, or late-stirring "professional people,”— members of spouting-clubs, and second-rate actors,-barristers without law, and medical students guiltless of physic; besides these, there flourish a set of City "choice spirits," who can't get so far west as "Pedley's Oyster-rooms," or "The Saloon," in Piccadilly, but must take their "lark" (moving homewards) between the Adelphi Theatre and Whitechapel; and now-andthen, perhaps, some grocer of Farringdon falls (vino gravidus) into the irregularity of a "set-to," and pays thirty shillings, "making-up" money, to his Jew-antagonist at St. Bride's Watchhouse, to save a jobation, at Guildhall, from the sitting Alderman, next day. This is the very "witching time," par excellence, of night, "When graves yield up their dead!" (because resurrection-men will have it so), when lamps are “rifled at," and sots pushed out of public-houses; and when the sober wayfarer starts, ever and anon, at that prolonged Hillyoh-ho-ho! that bellow, as it were, crescendo,-peculiar, I think, to the throats of the English, which frightens watchmen into their hutches, and quiet citizens into the kennel. This whoop by the way prolonged, which invites MANKIND, as it were, to clear the way, is, with us, a pure national, and not a local, characteristic. Both high and low affect the practice; both "good men" and bullies. We have it at Oxford and at Cambridge, where the gownsmen, if opposed, strip, and buff to their work like stout forty minutes" fellows; and again in London, where your flustered haberdasher, after defying perhaps a whole street, at last provokes somebody to thrash him, and is beat without a blow in his defence. 66 By two o'clock, however, the riotous get pretty well disposed of; some snug and flea-bitten, in their own personal garrets; more (and still fleabitten) in the compters of the police. The wickets of the night-houses, after this, open only to known customers; and the flying pieman ceases his call. The pickpockets, linked with the refuse of another pestilence of the town, are seen sauntering lazily towards their lurking places, in gangs of five and six together. And when these last stragglers of darkness have swept over the pavé, the debris of the evening may be considered as cleared off; and, except an occasional crash of oyster-shells cast (maugre Angelo Taylor) from some lobstershop, or the sharp rattle of a late billiard ball echoing from the rooms over Mrs. Salmon's, silence, or something like it, obtains for some brief minutes, while the idlers of night give place to the dark-working men of business. The earliest disturbers of London, until within these few years, were the market gardeners; who rolled lazily through the suburbs, about three, with their filled-up carts and waggons; — |