dinners and call yourself a barrister, or enter the army for some two months, or engage a studio and pretend you follow the fine arts; or, if you live in the country, become a J.P., and maintain your respectability by twice a year damning a peasant as a poacher. Wear a mask; you need not mind how thin it is; hide your head in the sand like the ostrich, and the world, more obliging than the bird's foes, will concede that your whole body is admirably concealed. Shams are now and then abused, but they are dearly loved for all that; and they are indispensable to civilisation. Look at a prince affecting to be a bricklayer, and laying a first stone; how he messes about with the silver trowel, and how the public applauds him—how it glories in the scene! Certainly shams are great institutions! Are all great institutions shams?
But it is not only in the higher circles that people pretend to be busy as an excuse for doing nothing. Royalty plays at soldiering and sailoring; our nobility follow the pursuit of legislation—there are certainly some very unbusiness-like senators; gentlemen of fortune bob their heads for one day in the law courts, and are burthened with a wig box and the title of barrister for the remainder of their natural lives (what would some of these do—how angry they would be—supposing anybody were to send them a brief!); very superior creatures have entered the army for the express purpose of retiring from it; there have been even clergymen who don't preach, and can't cure souls; perhaps doctors who heal for love and not for fees. And it is the same through all the strata of society. The analogy fits to every rundle of the ladder. There are plenty of persons, for instance, who keep shops by way of becomingly doing nothing. I have heard of crossing-sweepers whose avocation was a mere pretence—men of fortune, they held the broom from no regard for halfpence; simply because it behoved them to assume the semblance of industry; because they had heard the statements that Idleness was the root of all Evil, and that the English were an Industrious People and knew that as citizens they must act accordingly.
It cannot be supposed that all the shops in London are remunerative. Of course not. Many of them are tradesmen's follies in disguise, excuses for idleness; sometimes even expensive hobbies. As he cannot do nothing as a non-practising advocate or parson, or a retired soldier, the shopkeeper with a taste for idleness does nothing as a shop-keeper. I am about to introduce the reader to a shop and shopkeeper of this kind.
Soho Square had not been wholly handed over to trade, and many neighbouring streets had been only partially disfigured by shops. But the neighbourhood was steadily on the decline. Private houses were emptying—were in decided decadence, As a symbol of fall there were here and there tablets affixed between the parlour windows, inscribed with trade announcements: it was as though the houses had been marked out for destruction. By-and-by, parlour windows were abolished; the front was taken off the lower part of the house; for a day or two it remained like that—a ghastly object with an open wound; then came the inevitable, unmistakeable shop window. Gentility was gone for ever: Commerce reigned in its stead.
On a door of one of the houses in Freer Street, on the right-hand side going from Soho Square, was the name of "J. Phillimore." No mention of a trade followed this name, nor had the ground floor windows been blended into a shop front. Yet it was evident that some kind of business was supposed to be carried on in the house; decidedly some such impression was intended to be conveyed. For in one of the windows was a very black oil painting, of small size and without a frame, that looked as though it had been steeped in treacle. In the other window stood a carved frame, black with age, but without a picture; and it was not large enough for the picture in the window first mentioned. There was a background of green baize to these properties. What trade was carried on by Mr. Phillimore? If you had asked his neighbours they would have informed you that Mr. Phillimore was a picture dealer, and they would have considered that such an answer afforded you ample instruction on the subject.
It hardly did that. Mr. Phillimore kept a shop for the express purpose of doing nothing in it. He had not dealt in pictures for very many years; he never intended to deal in pictures again. He no more contemplated selling the picture and the frame in his windows, symbolising his supposititious trade, than a gold-beater reckons upon an offer to purchase the gilded arm and hammer projecting from his first-floor. There were one or two more pictures in the front room, which was not fitted up in the least like a shop; these also were rather treacly in hue, and quite French polished in surface, but were no more for sale than the ordinary fittings of the parlour of a private family. Mr. Phillimore lived on the premises. He was rich enough to retire from business, perhaps, but not rich enough to retire from his shop. So he resided in Freer Street, doing nothing but in compliance with social requirements previously alluded to: affecting to be a tradesman—pretending to deal in pictures.
It was a comfortable room, with a turkey carpet, a red flock paper, a bronze chandelier, antique chairs, and a mirror set in carved oak over the fire-place. The room at the back was its counterpart, only that it was smaller. Mr. Phillimore occupied the back room as a matter of preference. It was less cheerful than the other. It looked on to a water-butt and had a fine prospect of slated roofs and out-buildings and kitchen chimneys. But perhaps he had never been able to divest himself altogether of the notion that the front room was after all, strictly speaking, a shop; while no such impeachment could in any way attach to the back-parlour. And he became the room, did Mr. Phillimore; for he too was comfortable-looking—a prosperous man leading a cosy, methodical, enjoyable life; a bachelor, without the slightest intention of ever changing his condition. A bald-headed man, with yet a half-chaplet of rather long grey hair, and sometimes a jaunty velvet cap to hide his baldness, for he considered and cultivated his appearance. Round rosy features, a twinkling black eye, dark eye-brows, a portly figure, carefully dressed. He always wore black,