to Hampstead Heath, and at the back of the
Holloway Road, and such-like places. There was country everywhere. As a
whole, the London of to-day is a far statelier city than the London of my
earlier years. Everything was mean and dirty. I miss the twopenny
postman, to whom I had always to entrust a lot of letters--when I came up
from my village home--as thus the writers save a good sum of money on
every letter. There were few omnibuses, and they were dear. Old hackney
coaches abounded, and the cabs were few and far between, and very dirty
as well, all of which have immensely improved of late. The cab in which
I rode when I was set down by the coach at the White Horse, Fetter Lane,
then a much-frequented hotel of the highest respectability, was an awful
affair, hooded and on two high wheels, while the driver was perched on a
seat just outside. I was astonished--as well I might be--when I got to
that journey's end in safety.

In London and the environs everything was dull and common-place, with the
exception of Regent Street, where it was tacitly assumed the force of
grandeur could no further go. There was no Thames Embankment, and only a
collection of wharves and coal agencies, and tumble-down sheds, at all
times--especially when the tide was out--hideous to contemplate. The old
Houses of Parliament had been burnt down, and no costly palace had been
erected on their site. The Law Courts in Westminster Hall were crowded
and inconvenient. Where now Queen Victoria Street rears its stately head
were narrow streets and mean buildings. Eating-houses were close and
stuffy, and so were the inns, which now we call by the more dignified
name of hotels.

As to the poor sixty years ago, society was indifferent alike as to the
state of their souls or bodies. In Ratcliff Highway the sailor was
robbed right and left. The common lodging-house was a den of thieves.
The poor shirt-maker and needlewoman lived on starvation wages. Sanitary
arrangements were unknown. There was no decency of any kind; the
streets, or rather lanes, where the children played, with their open
sewers, were nurseries of disease. Even in Bethnal Green, the Sanitary
Commission found that while the mean age of death among the well-to-do
residents was forty-four, that of the working-classes was twenty-two; and
yet Bethnal Green with its open spaces was a garden of Eden compared with
the lodging-houses in some of the streets off Drury Lane. Perhaps the