n honorable burial. I emerged accidentally into
Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and the spectacle was one
I should have been sorry to miss. The crowd was enormous, but I managed
to squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab that was drawn up
beside the pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at the play.
Though it was a funeral that was going on I will not call it a tragedy;
but it was a very serious comedy. The day happened to be
magnificent--the finest of the year. The funeral had been taken in hand
by the classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament, and it had
the character of a great popular "manifestation." The hearse was
followed by very few carriages, but the cortege of pedestrians stretched
away in the sunshine, up and down the classic gentility of Piccadilly,
on a scale that was highly impressive. Here and there the line was
broken by a small brass band--apparently one of those bands of itinerant
Germans that play for coppers beneath lodging-house windows; but for the
rest it was compactly made up of what the newspapers call the dregs of
the population. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan mob, men and
women, boys and girls, the decent poor and the indecent, who had
scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up on their passage, and
were making a sort of solemn spree of it. Very solemn it all
was--perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along in an
interminable line, and as I looked at them out of the front of my hansom
I seemed to be having a sort of panoramic view of the under side, the
wrong side, of the London world. The procession was filled with figures
which seemed never to have "shown out," as the English say, before; of
strange, pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in the Piccadilly
sunshine. I have no space to describe them more minutely, but I found in
the whole affair something memorable. My impression rose not simply from
the radical, or as I may say for the sake of color, the revolutionary,
emanation of this dingy concourse, lighted up by the ironical sky; but
from the same causes that I had observed a short time before, on the day
the queen went to open Parliament, when in Trafalgar Square, looking
straight down into Westminster and over the royal cortege, were gathered
a group of banners and festoons, inscribed in big staring letters with
mottoes and sentiments which a sensitive police-department might easily
have found seditious. Th