; we found it in particular a world of costume, often of very odd
costume--the most intimate notes of which were the postmen in their
frock-coats of military red and their black beaver hats; the milkwomen,
in hats that often emulated these, in little shawls and strange short,
full frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails swung from their
shoulders on wooden yokes; the inveterate footmen hooked behind the
coaches of the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, together
with the mounted and belted grooms without the attendance of whom
riders, of whichever sex--and riders then were much more
numerous--almost never went forth. The range of character, on the other
hand, reached rather dreadfully down; there were embodied and
exemplified "horrors" in the streets beside which any present exhibition
is pale, and I well remember the almost terrified sense of their
salience produced in me a couple of years later, on the occasion of a
flying return from the Continent with my father, by a long, an
interminable drive westward from the London Bridge railway-station. It
was a soft June evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, as
they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of George Cruikshank's
Artful Dodger and his Bill Sikes and his Nancy, only with the bigger
brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the early-Victorian
fourwheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped up in more and
more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far to
the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a woman
reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the
face. The London view at large had in fact more than a Cruikshank, there
still survived in it quite a Hogarth, side--which I had of course then
no name for, but which I was so sharply to recognise on coming back
years later that it fixed for me the veracity of the great pictorial
chronicler. Hogarth's mark is even yet not wholly overlaid; though time
has _per contra_ dealt with that stale servility of address which most
expressed to our young minds the rich burden of a Past, the consequence
of too much history. I liked for my own part a lot of history, but felt
in face of certain queer old obsequiosities and appeals, whinings and
sidlings and hand-rubbings and curtsey-droppings, the general play of
apology and humility, behind which the great dim social complexity
seemed to mass itself, that one didn't quit