Restituted Royal
Family; yet here we are, you and I, the best of friends, talking it
all over."
As we jog along, or walk, by turns, we come to Buckingham Street,
and looking up at Alfred Jingle's lodgings say a grateful word of
Mr. Pickwick. We tell each other that much of what we know of
London and England seems to have been learned from Dickens.
Deny him the right to sit among the elect, if you will; talk of his
tendency to farce and caricature; call his humour low comedy, and
his pathos bathos - although you shall say none of these things in my
presence unchallenged; the fact remains that every child, in America
at least, knows more of England - its almshouses, debtors' prisons,
and law-courts, its villages and villagers, its beadles and cheap-
jacks and hostlers and coachmen and boots, its streets and lanes,
its lodgings and inns and landladies and roastbeef and plum-pudding,
its ways, manners, and customs, - knows more of these things and a
thousand others from Dickens's novels than from all the histories,
geographies, biographies, and essays in the language. Where is
there another novelist who has so peopled a great city with his
imaginary characters that there is hardly room for the living
population, as one walks along the ways?
O these streets of London! There are other more splendid shades in
them, - shades that have been there for centuries, and will walk
beside us so long as the streets exist. One can never see these
shades, save as one goes on foot, or takes that chariot of the
humble, the omnibus. I should like to make a map of literary London
somewhat after Leigh Hunt's plan, as projected in his essay on the
World of Books; for to the book-lover 'the poet's hand is always on
the place, blessing it.' One can no more separate the association
from the particular spot than one can take away from it any other
beauty.
'Fleet Street is always Johnson's Fleet Street' (so Leigh Hunt
says); 'the Tower belongs to Julius Caesar, and Blackfriars to
Suckling, Vandyke, and the Dunciad. . .I can no more pass through
Westminster without thinking of Milton, or the Borough without
thinking of Chaucer and Shakespeare, or Gray's Inn without calling
Bacon to mind, or Bloomsbury Square without Steele and Akenside,
than I can prefer brick and mortar to wit and poetry, or not see a
beauty upon it beyond architecture in the splendour of the
recollection.'
Chapter X. Apropos of advertisements.
Francesca wishes to get some old hall-marked silver for her home
tea-tray, and she is absorbed at present in answering advertisements
of people who have second-hand pieces for sale, and who offer to
bring them on approval. The other day, when Willie Beresford and I
came in from Westminster Abbey (where we had been choosing the best
locations for our memorial tablets), we thought Francesca must be
giving a 'small and early'; but it transpired that all the silver-
sellers had called at the same hour, and it took the united strength
of Dawson and Mr. Beresford, together with my diplomacy, to rescue
the poor child from their clutches. She came out alive, but her
safety was purchased at the cost of a George IV. cream-jug, an
Elizabethan sugar-bowl, and a Boadicea tea-caddy, which were, I
doubt not, manufactured in Wardour Street towards the close of the
nineteenth century.
Salemina came in just then, cold and tired. (Tower and National
Gallery the same day. It's so much more work to go to the Tower
nowadays than it used to be!) We had intended to take a sail to
Richmond on a penny steamboat, but it was drizzling, so we had a
cosy fire instead, slipped into our tea-gowns, and ordered tea and
thin bread-and-butter, a basket of strawberries with their frills
on, and a jug of Devonshire cream. Willie Beresford asked if he
might stay; otherwise, he said, he should have to sit at a cold
marble table on the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly, and take
his tea in bachelor solitude.
"Yes," I said severely, "we will allow you to stay; though, as you
are coming to dinner, I should think you would have to go away some
time, if only in order that you might get ready to come back.
You've been here since breakfast-time."
"I know," he answered calmly, "and my only error in judgment was
that I didn't take an earlier breakfast, in order to begin my day
here sooner. One has to snatch a moment when he can, nowadays; for
these rooms are so infested with British swells that a base-born
American stands very little chance!"
Now I should like to know if Willie Beresford is in love with
Francesca. What shall I do - that is what shall we do - if he is,
when she is in love with somebody else? To be sure, she may want
one lover for foreign and another for domestic service. He is too
old for her, but that is always the way. When Alcides, having gone
through all the fatigues of life, took a bride in Olympus, he ought
to have selected Minerva, but he chose Hebe.
I wonder why so many people call him 'Willie' Beresford, at his age.
Perhaps it is because his mother sets the example; but from her lips
it does not seem amiss. I suppose when she looks at him she recalls
the past, and is ever seeing the little child in the strong man,
mother fashion. It is very beautiful, that feeling; and when a girl
surprises it in any mother's eyes it makes her heart beat faster, as
in the presence of something sacred, which she can understand only
because she is a woman, and experience is foreshadowed in intuition.
