CHAPTER XVIII.

The Penny-a-mile Train and its Passengers. Aunt Jonathan. - London by Night. St. Paul's; the City as seen from the Dome. - The Lord Mayor's Coach. - Westminster Abbey. - The Gothic Architecture a less exquisite Production of the Human Mind than the Grecian. -- Poets' Corner. The Mission of the Poets. - The Tombs of the Kings. The Monument of James Watt. A humble Coffee-house and its Frequenters. The Woes of Genius in London. - Old 110, Thames-street. The Tower. The Thames Tunnel. - Longings of the True Londoner for Rural Life and the Country; their Influence on Literature. — The British Museum; its splendid Collection of Fossil Remains. - Human Skeleton of Guadaloupe. - The Egyptian Room. - Domesticities of the Ancient Egyptians. Cycle of Reproduction. - The Mummies.

I MUST again take the liberty, as on a former occasion, of ante-dating a portion of my tour: I did not proceed direct to London from Olney; but as I have nothing interesting to record of my journeyings in the interval, I shall pursue the thread of my narrative as if I had.

For the sake of variety, I had taken the penny-a-mile train; and derived some amusement from the droll humors of my travelling companions, — a humbler, coarser, freer, and, withal, merrier section of the people, than the second-class travellers, whose acquaintance, in at least my railway peregrinations, I had chiefly cultivated hitherto. We had not the happiness of producing any very good jokes among us; but there were many laudable attempts; and, though the wit was only tolerable, the laughter was hearty. There was an old American lady of the company, fresh from Yankee-land, who was grievously teased for the general benefit; but aunt Jonathan, though only indif

ferently furnished with teeth, had an effective tongue; and Mister Bull, in most of the bouts, came off but second best. The American, too, though the play proved now and then somewhat of a horse character, was evidently conscious that her country lost no honor by her, and seemed rather gratified than otherwise. There were from five-and-twenty to thirty passengers in the van; among the rest, a goodly proportion of town-bred females, who mingled in the fun at least as freely as was becoming, and were smart, when they could, on the American; and immediately beside the old lady there sat a silent, ruddy country girl, who seemed travelling to London to take service in some family. The old lady had just received a hit from a smart female, to whom she deigned no reply; but, turning round to the country girl, she patted her on the shoulder, and tendered her a profusion of thanks for some nameless obligation which, she said, she owed to her. "La! to me, ma'am?" said the girl. "Yes, to you, my pretty dear," said the American: "it is quite cheering to find one modest Englishwoman among so few." The men laughed outrageously; the females did not like the joke half so well, and bridled up. And thus the war went on. The weather had been unpromising, — the night fell exceedingly dark and foul,— there were long wearisome stoppages at almost every station, — and it was within an hour of midnight, and a full hour and a half beyond the specified time of arrival, ere we entered the great city. I took my place in an omnibus, beside a half-open window, and away the vehicle trundled for the Strand.

The night was extremely dreary; the rain fell in torrents; and the lamps, flickering and flaring in the wind, threw dismal gleams over the half-flooded streets and the wet pavement, revealing the pyramidal rain-drops as they danced by myriads in the pools, or splashed against the smooth slippery flagstones.

The better shops were all shut, and there were but few lights in the windows: sober, reputable London seemed to have gone to its bed in the hope of better weather in the morning; but here and there, as we hurried past the opening of some lane or alley, I could mark a dazzling glare of light streaming out into the rain from some low cellar, and see forlorn figures of ill-dressed men and draggled women flitting about in a style which indicated that London not sober and not reputable was still engaged in drinking hard drams. Some of the objects we passed presented in the uncertain light a ghostly-like wildness, which impressed me all the more, that I could but guess at their real character. And the guesses, in some instances, were sufficiently wide of the mark. I passed in New Road a singularly picturesque community of statues, which, in the uncertain light, seemed a parliament of spectres, held in the rain and the wind, to discuss the merits of the "Interment in Towns" Commission, somewhat in the style the two ghosts discussed, in poor Ferguson's days, in the Greyfriars' churchyard, the proposed investment of the Scotch Hospital funds in the Three per Cents. But I found in the morning that the picturesque parliament of ghosts were merely the chance-grouped figures of a stone-cutter's yard. The next most striking object I saw were the long ranges of pillars in Regent-street. They bore about them an air that I in vain looked for by day, of doleful, tomb-like grandeur, as the columns came in sight, one after one, in the thickening fog, and the lamps threw their paley gleams along the endless architrave. Then came Charing Cross, with its white jetting fountains, sadly disturbed in their play by the wind, and its gloomy, shade-like equestrians. And then I reached a quiet lodging-house in Hungerford-street, and tumbled, a little after midnight, into a comfortable bed. The morning arose as gloomily as the evening had closed; and the

first sounds I heard, as I awoke, were the sharp patter of raindrops on the panes, and the dash of water from the spouts on the pavement below.

Towards noon, however, the rain ceased, and I sallied out to see London. I passed great and celebrated places,- Warren's great blacking establishment, and the great house of the outfitting Jew and his son, so celebrated in "Punch," and then the great "Punch's" own office, with great "Punch" "Punch" himself, pregnant with joke, and larger than the life, standing sentinel over the door. And after just a little uncertain wandering, the uncertainty of which mattered nothing, as I could not possibly go wrong, wander where I might, I came full upon St. Paul's, and entered the edifice. It is comfortable to have only twopence to pay for leave to walk over the area of so noble a pile, and to have to pay the twopence, too, to such grave, clerical-looking men as the officials at the receipt of custom. It reminds one of the blessings of a religious establishment in a place where otherwise they might possibly be overlooked: no private company could afford to build such a pile as St. Paul's, and then show it for twopences. A payment of eighteenpence more opened my way to the summit of the dome, and I saw, laid fairly at my feet, all of London that the smoke and the weather permitted, in its existing state of dishabille, to come into sight. But though a finer morning might have presented me with a more extensive and more richly-colored prospect, it would scarce have given me one equally striking. I stood over the middle of a vast seething cauldron, and looked down through the blue reek on the dim indistinct forms that seemed parboiling within. The denser clouds were rolling away, but their huge volumes still lay folded all around on the outskirts of the prospect. I could see a long reach of the river, with its gigantic bridges striding across; but both ends of the tide, like

those of the stream şeen by Mirza, were enveloped in darkness; and the bridges, gray and unsolid-looking themselves, as if cut out of sheets of compressed vapor, seemed leading to a spectral city. Immediately in the foreground there lay a perplexed labyrinth of streets and lanes, and untraceable ranges of buildings, that seemed the huddled-up fragments of a fractured puzzle, — difficult enough of resolution when entire, and rendered altogether unresolvable by the chance that had broken it. As the scene receded, only the larger and more prominent objects came into view, — here a spire, and there a monument, and yonder a square Gothic tower; and as it still further receded, I could see but the dim fragments of things, — bits of churches inwrought into the cloud, and the insulated pediments and columned fronts of public buildings, sketched off in diluted gray. I was reminded of Sir Walter Scott's recipe for painting a battle: a great cloud to be got up as the first part of the process; and as the second, here and there an arm or a leg stuck in, and here and there a head or a body. And such was London, the greatest city of the world, as I looked upon it this morning, for the first time, from the golden gallery of St. Paul's.

The hour of noon struck on the great bell far below my feet; the pigmies in the thoroughfare of St. Paul's Yard, still further below, were evidently increasing in number and gathering into groups; I could see faces that seemed no bigger than fists thickening in the windows, and dim little figures starting up on the leads of houses; and then, issuing into the Yard from one of the streets, there came a long line of gay coaches, with the identical coach in the midst, all gorgeous and grand, that I remembered to have seen done in Dutch gold, full fiveand-thirty years before, on the covers of a splendid sixpenny edition of "Whittington and his Cat." Hurrah for Whitting