BETRAYED SHE hid within the tropic gloom And found the truth, the truth unsought. Another sat upon her throne, A phantom queen was in her place, The lurid light was in her eyes, A deadly pallor on her cheek; Fierce words which yet she could not speak: 'Bend, bend above her till she learns Pour vows into her dainty ear, Vows poison-sweet no bee would sip, Until her brow with passion sear, Grasp with the hand no longer mine, Spare not the arts you did not spare Leave not the prey till all be done. For her may she your vows believe, Then learn you live but to deceive, Thus, where the palmy verdure made And her whose beauty was her doom. SECOND SERIES, VOL. VIII. F.S. VOL. XVIII. WILLIAM SAWYER. N IMAGINARY LONDON A delusive Directory BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA VI. GREAT MAHOGANY-STREET, W.C. I HAPPENED the other day-it was Tuesday the 27th of February 1872, I think-to be in St. Paul's Cathedral, E.C. (I will give it a real and not an imaginary name for once in the way), on a matter of public business, a business indeed in which some twelve thousand people besides myself, including some very grand folks indeed, were likewise concerned. The business comprised, and was brought to a termination by, a short sermon from the Archbishop of Canterbury; and so, while his Grace was in the pulpit perorating, I improved the occasion to make my way out of the cathedral, having, I may hint, some other private business to transact in a newspaper-office in the middle of Brain-street, and foreseeing, as I did, that there would be a tremendous crush at Floodgate when good Dr. Tait had dismissed the enormous congregation in the cathedral. I am a candid soul, and may as well own that I had besides a little private business of my own on hand, and of a very pressing nature; for I had been abroad and at work since seven o'clock that February morning, and as I was anxious to obtain some trifling refreshment-say the quarter of a pork-pie and a bottle of vichy water, my usual luncheon on occasions of national moment (when the Prince of Wales was married I took sarsaparilla and a trotter)—before I went into harness again, to work, so it seemed to me, until my hair grew through my hat and my nails through the toes of my boots. Talk of the galleys at Toulon! talk of the treadmill! Try a Thanksgiving-day; strive to write about it; and then tell me how you like it. I reached St. Paul's-churchyard in safety, and was preparing to descend Floodgate-hill in peace, when I became aware of a most portentous thing, over which a guard of honour of the Scots Fusileers and a strong detachment of the City police were keeping watch and ward. Colonel Fraser, commissioner of the last-named force, rode up, in full uniform and a beautiful cocked-hat, to where the portent stood, and looked at it curiously. I fancy that the gallant colonel was rather puzzled to know what to make of it. At all events, he ordered me to stand back, and then rode away on his handsome horse hurriedly. I don't think I should mind being a commissioner of police, if they would let me wear a smart uniform and a cocked-hat on gala-days, and order people about. How I would worry my super intendents and inspectors, to be sure! I don't think Colonel Fraser, who looks a good-natured kind of man, worries anybody unnecessarily; but then his temper has not been exacerbated by a long years' course of staring at shows and pageants through a double opera-glass, and then writing reams of verbiage about them afterwards against time and the promptings of your viscera-les tiraillements de l'estomac, as the French nervously say-and the dictates of your own reason, which tells you answerably that all you have to say would be very appropriately dismissed in a brief paragraph. Not talk, but excessive written and afterwards printed words are the chief curse of this age. Talk passes away like froth. Manuscript and letterpress remain like dregs. Before you can hope to be good and happy, Eugenius (Eugenius is a little boy who has grown big, and whom I am trying to dissuade from the adoption of journalism as a profession), you must abjure the rough magic of word-spinning and burn your newspapers. But as to this portent. It was a coach, and one of the most remarkable coaches perhaps extant in this country. Did you ever see Mr. Frith's capital picture of Claude Duval, the ladies' highwayman, exacting a ransom from a fair dame he had captured by causing her to dance a coranto with him? There is a coach in the painting I mean; and it is something like the vehicle I saw last February in the churchyard. There should likewise be by some Scottish artist, whose name I forget, a picture of the murder of Archbishop Sharpe by John Balfour of Burley and his fanatical fellows. What has brought the fierce old Cameronian to my mind at this particular conjuncture, I wonder? Well, I happened to have seen among the grand folks assembled in St. Paul's a certain North-British peer, bearing the title of Balfour of Burley. The coach from which the assassins (for conscience' sake) dragged the unlucky prelate was of the same model with that I now beheld; and my mind flying off at a not unreasonable tangent to the first chapter of Old Mortality, I remembered the wonderful coach in which the lord lieutenant of the county and his family, with the chaplain in the boot, and the footmen armed to the teeth with cutlasses and blunderbusses hanging down behind, patronised that Wappenshaw at which Guse Gibbie made so deplorable an exhibition of himself, and brought such woful discredit on the knightly house of Tillietudlum. The coach at St. Paul's was, in good sooth, a most venerable ark ; a pentagonal cube in shape, and weighing, I am sure I don't know how many tons. I have no memory for statistics; and does it so much matter how many tons or hundredweights or pounds anything weighs, any more than it concerns us to be told that fifty thousand teetotalers at a Crystal Palace fête consumed fifty thousand pork-pies, seventy-five thousand plum-buns, and a hundred and fifty thousand cups of tea? If I am killed in a battle, what does it matter to me if the instrument of my death be a cannon-ball as big as a family plum-pudding, or a conical bullet no larger than a lady's thimble from a revolver? Do I care to know how many millions of hairs I have got in my head? No; I only trouble myself to inquire whether I am growing bald or not, and whether Mrs. S. A. Allen's hair-restorer will arrest the progress of my calvity. The pores of your skin might be reckoned, I suppose, by millions. What odds, so long as you keep your hide unflayed by the hangman's whip? Figures are not facts; although this slate-scribbling, column-casting, root-extracting, fraction-mongering epoch assumes in his superficial sciolism that because two and two seem to make four, they are really the quadruple multiple of one. They are nothing whatever of the sort. One is a mystery. You are ONE. A common-councilman close to me, with a chimney-pot hat hideously topping the blue mazarine gown with catskin trimmings with which his pudgy frame was enwrapped, remarked to a friend in a chocolate-coloured gabardine, that he heerd the pannils of the carridge was painted by Moriller.' I have never heard that Don Estiban Murillo ever devoted himself to coach-painting, although, as he was, like his compeer Don Diego Velasquez, a favourite at court, there is no knowing how far his loyal deference to the commands of the King of Spain and the Indies might have led him. Didn't Vandermuller paint the soles of Louis XIV.'s shoes with delightful miniatures representing the victories of the Grand Monarque? And at the jubilee of 1809 did not Mr. T. Stothard, R.A., paint for the illuminations at night a transparency which was hung over the entrance to the apartments of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, and which represented the twelve moral virtues bearing King George III. in top-boots and a pigtail in their midst, and contemplating the comfortable spectacle of the devil flying away with Bonaparte? I doubt, nevertheless, whether in any case Moriller' came to England to exercise his possible ability to paint coach-panels. Tremendous black horses, of apparently enormous strength, and trapped with harness covered with tags and bobs and gilt plates, were harnessed to the huge conveyance. The burgher in the mazarine gown told his gown-fellow that the horses had been lent for the day by Messrs. Pickford of railway-van celebrity; but he in chocolate seemed to lean somewhat to the conclusion that a selection had been made in this instance from the stud of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins. But while they were jabbering their commonplaces, my faculties had begun to ramble. The ark, I learnt from an intelligent inspector of police, was the state carriage of the Speaker of the House of Commons. It had brought, with a single life-guardsman to escort it, the Right Honourable Mr. Brand from Westminster to St. Paul's that morning, and was in waiting to take him back again, with his train-bearer and the official in charge of the silver-gilt poker, once |