uncomfortable machines,
with perforated tin sashes instead of window-glasses, and grumbling,
ever-dissatisfied drivers. There were very few sedan chairs; these
were still a comparative novelty for general use, and their bearers
were much abused for their drunkenness, clumsiness, and incivility.

The streets were always crowded. Coaches, chairs, wheelbarrows, fops,
chimney-sweeps, porters bearing huge burdens, bullies swaggering with
great swords, bailiffs chasing some impecunious poet, cutpurses,
funerals, christenings, weddings, and street fights, would seem from
some contemporary accounts to be invariably mixed up together in
helpless and apparently inextricable confusion. The general
bewilderment was made more bewildering by the very babel of street
cries bawled from the sturdy lungs of orange-girls, chair-menders,
broom-sellers, ballad-singers, old-clothes men, and wretched
representatives of the various jails, raising their plaintive appeal to
"remember the poor prisoners." The thoroughfares, however, would have
been in still worse condition but for the fact that so much of the
passenger traffic of the metropolis was done by water and not by land.
The wherries on the Thames were as frequent as the gondolas on the
canals of Venice. Across the river, down the river, up the river,
passengers hurried incessantly in the swift little boats that plied for
hire, and were rowed by one man with a pair of sculls, or two men with
oars. Despite the numbers of the river steamers at present, and the
crowds who take advantage of them, it may well be doubted whether so
large a proportion of the passenger traffic of London is borne by the
river in the days of Queen Victoria as there was in the days of Queen
Anne.

Darkness and danger ruled the roads at night with all the horrors of
the Rome of Juvenal. Oil lamps flickered freely in some of the better
streets, but even these were not lit so long as any suggestion of
twilight served for {72} an excuse to delay the illumination. When the
moon shone they were not lit at all. Link-boys drove a busy trade in
lighting belated wanderers to their homes, and saving them from the
perils of places where the pavement was taken up or where open sewers
yawned. Precaution was needful, for pitfalls of the kind were not
always marked by warning lanterns. Footpads roamed about, and worse
than footpads. The fear of the Mohocks had not yet faded from civic
memories, and there were still w