und, the sordid struggle with
poverty shows itself unreservedly on the filthy pavement; gathers its
forces through the week; and, strengthening to a tumult on Saturday
night, sees the Sunday morning dawn in murky gaslight. Miserable women,
whose faces never smile, haunt the butchers' shops in such London
localities as these, with relics of the men's wages saved from the
public-house clutched fast in their hands, with eyes that devour the
meat they dare not buy, with eager fingers that touch it covetously,
as the fingers of their richer sisters touch a precious stone. In this
district, as in other districts remote from the wealthy quarters of the
metropolis, the hideous London vagabond--with the filth of the street
outmatched in his speech, with the mud of the street outdirtied in his
clothes--lounges, lowering and brutal, at the street corner and the
gin-shop door; the public disgrace of his country, the unheeded warning
of social troubles that are yet to come. Here, the loud self-assertion
of Modern Progress--which has reformed so much in manners, and altered
so little in men--meets the flat contradiction that scatters its
pretensions to the winds. Here, while the national prosperity feasts,
like another Belshazzar, on the spectacle of its own magnificence, is
the Writing on the Wall, which warns the monarch, Money, that his glory
is weighed in the balance, and his power found wanting.

Situated in such a neighborhood as this, Vauxhall Walk gains by
comparison, and establishes claims to respectability which no impartial
observation can fail to recognize. A large proportion of the Walk is
still composed of private houses. In the scattered situations where
shops appear, those shops are not besieged by the crowds of more
populous thoroughfares. Commerce is not turbulent, nor is the public
consumer besieged by loud invitations to "buy." Bird-fanciers have
sought the congenial tranquillity of the scene; and pigeons coo,
and canaries twitter, in Vauxhall Walk. Second-hand carts and cabs,
bedsteads of a certain age, detached carriage-wheels for those who
may want one to make up a set, are all to be found here in the same
repository. One tributary stream, in the great flood of gas which
illuminates London, tracks its parent source to Works established in
this locality. Here the followers of John Wesley have set up a temple,
built before the period of Methodist conversion to the principles of
architectural religion. And here--m