all that makes life delightful to the feelings and the senses, and now all that is quite, quite gone! Were I to knock at the door now, and race up the stairs as of old, Betty would be overcome, and the excellent head of the family inside would give me in charge on the suspicion of having a design against the great-coats and umbrellas. No poetry in London! No poetry save a man is sitting and sneezing on a swab of wet moss—a Highland piper being at hand with one of those horrid instruments of torture applied to his hard, horny lips! Why, one could write a sonnet about South Audley Street.
But if London at all times is better than any other place you could name, what is it not during the season, when every joy is at its climax, and when all your friends and acquaintances from all parts of the country, and from all parts of the continent, and from all parts of the world, come dropping in thick as gnats used to be in summer evenings—when there were summer evenings, and there were gnats. I know that some unneighbourly sort of people will have it that London is most delightful in September, when everybody is out of town, and the Hindu sweeper in Saint James’s Square leaves off peddling with the unprofitable mud at his crossing, and, folding his arms across his breast, meekly gives in to Budhism. Of course London is pleasant in September when the seat of empire is your own—but it is pleasant as sleep is after toil, or night after day. I like, as well as any man, to have the library in the club entirely to myself, and to moralise in the deserts of Old Bond Street, but human nature has also its social and its gorgeous side. I have a rich vein of duchesses in my mind, which I can open up during the London season. If ever there was a loiterer by old bookshops, and a lover of old crinkum-crankums of every kind, I am that idle, useless person: but of all the fair sights which the London streets can show, the fairest are those beautiful young maids and matrons who, as the season grows fervent, are drawn about in their triumphal cars by horses such as Greece never dreamed of, for all the testimony of her Elgin marbles. How all that human ingenuity could contrive, or human industry procure from all quarters of the globe, has been lavished on these Summer Queens; and how they take it as a matter of course, as the rose does its fragrance, or the humming-bird the iridescence of its restless wings! What a pity it would be if humanity could be at all mown down to a dead level like a lawn, and the heavens, in place of containing the greater and the lesser glories, were all lit up with myriads of farthing candles, all of equal dimness. The Londoner who has learned to enjoy his season properly, and to linger over its flavour, as a true scholar in wines would trifle with a beaded glass of amber Sauterne, and bless the Château-Yquem where it was cradled into sweetness, knows well what pleasures can be extracted from the mere contemplation of those more heroic exemplars of humanity who glide about the town in such Elysian guise. Archbishop Whately and the economists are right: you must have duchesses, that it may be well with the beggars; but for poor Dives, who I protest to my thinking, was somewhat hardly used, there would have been no broken victuals, no savoury scraps for starving Lazarus. But these are knotty points;—we had best fall back on the London season.
I lay no great stress on that false start before Easter. It is but a foretaste, or rather a whet before the banquet; indeed it might more aptly be compared to the tuning-up of the fiddle before Signor Costa takes his seat, and with one wave of his magic wand opens the Palace of Music at a blow. If any one should be disposed to take a little turn to the French capital before the occurrence of the Easter winter—of late years we have commonly had snow at that season—if there were not room for actual commendation, you would scarcely think him worthy of absolute blame. It is the time when second and third-rate singers establish their failures as facts on the operatic stage. It is the time when theatrical managers depend upon the fag-ends of worn-out themes, and try the patience of the public whilst they are burnishing up their tinsel and spangles for fresh and unwonted effects. It is a time when shabby-genteel people who but wish to spread a report about their vicinage that they have been up to London “for the season,” spend a fortnight or three weeks in town, and return to their usual and congenial hypocrisies, under the false impression that they are not found out. There is little good, and much bad about that false-birth, the London season before Easter. The real people will not keep open-houses for shadows. Those who constantly inhabit London, maintain the even tenor of their way, and will not suffer themselves to be drawn into demonstrations which can have no substantial results. The country pilgrims have not yet arrived. They wisely stop down in their own domains, and refuse to bear their part in an idle mockery. You may notice that this is the time chosen by the astuter shopkeepers for calling to their aid the skill of the house-painter and decorator. They have put their cleanings and burnishings off till the last moment, that they may show in full brilliancy when it is most needful to be brilliant. They know what can be accomplished in three weeks by a combination between inclement skies and London “blacks,” and will not make their running till the critical moment. Their gains before Easter are nothing but tributes from country cousins, not worthy of serious account.
When the real season has set in, it seems as though all persons who can do anything better than their fellows, in any quarter of the globe, had descended like a swarm of locusts upon the town. The Monsieurs, and the Signori, and the Herrs, flock to our shores with the hope of levying tribute from the Londoners in one form or another. One gentleman has a marvellous ut de poitrine; another produces musical sounds by merely thumping his chin; a third can do more in the conjuring way than has ever been thought possible before; a fourth relies for success upon the intelligent action of a set of well trained poodles; a fifth will cure all your ailments by throwing her- or him- self into a mesmeric condition, and prescribing apt remedies for your