as the Royal Exchange, which kept alive the
memory of the great civic benefactor, Sir Thomas Gresham, and the maiden
Queen; but everywhere the streets were narrow and the houses mean.
Holborn Hill led to a deep valley, on one side of which ran a lane filled
with pickpockets, and cut-throats and ruffians of all kinds, into which
it was not safe for any one to enter. And as you climbed the hill you
came to Newgate Market, along which locomotion was almost impossible all
the early morning, as there came from the north and the south and the
east and the west all the suburban butchers for their daily supply. Just
over the way on the left was that horror of horrors, Smithfield, where on
a market day some thousands of oxen and sheep by unheard of brutality had
been penned up, waiting to be purchased and let loose mad with hunger and
thirst and fright and pain all over the narrow streets of the city, to
the danger of pedestrians, especially such as were old and feeble.
Happily, St. Bartholomew's Hospital was close by, and the sufferer had
perhaps a chance of life. The guardians of the streets were the new
police, the Peelers or the Bobbies as they were sarcastically called.
The idiotic public did not think much of them; they were the thin edge of
the wedge, their aim was to destroy the glorious liberty of every man, to
do all the mischief they could, and to enslave the people. Was not Sir
Robert Peel a Tory of the Tories and the friend of Wellington, so beloved
by the people that he had to guard his house with iron shutters? At that
time the public was rather badly off for heroes, with the exception of
Orator Hunt, who got into Parliament and collapsed, as most of the men of
the people did. Yet I was a Liberal--as almost all Dissenters were with
the exception of the wealthy who attended at the Poultry or at Walworth,
where John and George Clayton preached.

In the City life was unbearable by reason of the awful noise of the
stone-paven streets, now happily superseded by asphalte. Papers were
dear, but in all parts of London there were old-fashioned coffee and chop
houses where you could have a dinner at a reasonable price and read the
newspapers and magazines. Peele's, in Fleet Street, at the corner of
Fetter Lane, was a great place for newspapers and reporters and special
correspondents. Many a newspaper article have I written there. Then
there were no clubs, or hardly any, and such places as the Cheshire
Cheese, with