CHAP. XI.]

The new Post-office bears inscribed on the frieze above the columns of the façade the date of the reign of George IV., 1829. Yet it was set about in 1815, after the old situation in Lombard Street had been found unfit for the enlarged and increasing business of the establishment. It is amusing to read now, in the papers of the time, the accounts of the vastness of the new establishment, as transcending even the needs of the expanding postal communication of the day. If any one could have foreseen what was to happen to the postal communication of Great Britain within a few years, a somewhat different tone would have been used. But it is well that men should enjoy the spectacle of their own achievements for a while, before they become abashed by a knowledge of the greater things yet to be done. The new Postoffice will always be considered fine in aspect; and in 1829 it might fairly be called vast in its dimensions and arrangements, however much these may need enlargement to meet the wants of a later time.

During the same year, London University was advancing; the ground was clearing for the erection of King's College; and the Athenæum Club-house was preparing for the reception of its members at the opening of the next year. The club had been in existence six years; and it was now so flourishing as to be able to build for itself the beautiful house which overlooks the area where the regent's palace of Carlton House stood at the time of its origin. These modern clubs are a feature of the age worthy of note; for they differ essentially from the clubs so famous in the last two centuries. The two have no condition in common, except that of admission by ballot, or by consent of the rest, however expressed. Dr Johnson's account of a club is, that it is an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions;' but there is implied in this a degree of mutual acquaintanceship and fellowship which do not exist in the large modern clubs, where the object is not political or literary, or even social, but merely the personal convenience and enjoyment of the members, who use for this object the principle of the economy of association. The modern club is a mixture of the hotel, the home, and the readingroom. The member calls for what he pleases, and is waited on as at a hotel; he goes in and out, and lives in splendid apartments without daily charge, as at home, his subscription covering his expenses; and he sees newspapers and books, and meets acquaintances, as at the reading-room. Of the convenience of the arrangement, of the soundness of the principle of the economy of association, there can be no doubt; and it is on this account-because it may be hoped that the principle will be extended from these clubbists to classes which need the aid more pressingly -that the London clubs of this century form so important a feature of the time. There is some complaint that these luxurious abodes draw men from home, make them fond of a bachelor-life, and tend to discourage marriage-already growing too infrequent among the upper classes of society-and to lessen the intercourse between men and women of education; objections which will never be practically available against the clear daily convenience of such institutions. The remedy will be found, if it is

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found, not in unmaking these associations, but in extending them to a point which will obviate the objections. Already, the less opulent classes are stirring to prove the principle of the economy of association in clubs, where the object is, not bachelor luxury and ease, but comfort and intellectual advantage, in which wife and sister may share the general table, library, and lecture-room; where those whose daily business lies far from home may enjoy mid-day comfort and evening improvement at a moderate expense, through the association of numbers. The city-clerk, the shopman, the music and drawing master and mistress, the daily governess, married persons, and brothers and sisters, can now live out of town, can dine here, and see the newspapers, and stay for the evening lecture, while enjoying the benefit of an abode in the country, instead of a lodging in a close street in the city. When the experiment has been tried somewhat further, and found to succeed, it may be hoped that women will have courage to adopt the principle, and to obtain more comfort and advantage out of a slender income than a multitude of widows and single women do now. In a state of society like our own at present -a transition state as regards the position of women -the lot of the educated woman with narrow means is a particularly hard one. Formerly, every woman above the labouring-class was supported by father, husband, or brother; and marriage was almost universal. In the future, possibly marriage may again become general; and if not, women will assuredly have an independent position of self-maintenance, and more and more employments will be open to them, as their abilities and their needs may demand. At present, there is an intervening state, in which the condition of a multitude of women of the middle class is hard. Marriage is not now general, except among the poor. Of the great middle class it is computed that only half, or little more, marry before middle age. It is no longer true that every woman

supported by husband, father, or brother; a multitude of women have to support themselves; and only too many of them, their fathers and brothers too; but few departments of industry are yet opened to them, and those few are most inadequately paid. While this state of things endureswhich, however, cannot be for long-there is a multitude of educated women in London, and the country-towns of England, living in isolation on means so small as to command scarcely the bare necessaries of life. They are dispersed as boarders in schools and lodging-houses, able to obtain nothing more than mere food, shelter, and clothes; without society, without books, without the pleasures of art or science, while the gentlemen of the London clubs are living in luxury on the same expenditure, by means of the principle of economy of association. When such women have looked a little longer on the handsome exterior of these club-houses, and heard a little more of the luxury enjoyed within, it may be hoped that they will have courage to try an experiment of their own; clubbing together their small means-their incomes, their books and music and make a home where, without increased expenditure, they may command a good table

good apartments, a library, and the advantages and pleasures of society. It seems scarcely possible that the new-club principle of our time, already extending, should stop short of this, while so many are looking forward to a much wider application still. Those who think this a reasonable expectation will consider the opening of the Athenæum Club-house, with its 1000 members, and that of the United Service and other neighbouring joint-stock mansions, a sign of the times worth noting.

Two large public buildings were rising at this time within a few miles of London, which have nothing in common but their date. There was a grand stand on Epsom race-course, of which nothing more need be said than what was said at the time; that it was 'on a more magnificent scale than the stand at Doncaster.' What does the subject admit of more? The other edifice was the Metropolitan Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell; of whose destination so much might be said as to need a volume. We can merely note here what a history of the time requires-that the mode of life within those walls was almost as new as the edifice itself; and there were things to be seen there far nobler and more interesting than any architectural spectacle ever offered to the eyes of men. The building up that was to go on within was far grander than any that could be seen without-the building up of the overthrown faculties-the restoration of shattered affections. The Middlesex magistrates secured the services of Dr and Mrs (afterwards Sir William and Lady) Ellis as superintendents; and their method of management stands in noble contrast with that of former times, when the insane were subjected to no medicinal or moral treatment, but only to coercion. Instead of being chained, and left in idleness and misery, the patients here were immediately employed, and permitted all the liberty which their employment required. Not only might they be seen gardening with the necessary tools; but the men dug a canal, by which stores were brought up to the building at a great saving of expense. A score of insane men might be seen there, working with spade, pickaxe, and shovel; they built the wall; they kept the place in repair; they worked and lived much as other men would have done; and from first to last, no accident happened. They attended chapel; and no interruption to the service ever occurred. The women earned in their workrooms the means of buying an organ for the chapelservice. No sign of the times can be more worthy of notice than this-that the insane had begun to be treated like other diseased persons, by medicine and regimen, and with the sympathy and care that their suffering state requires. As for the results, the recoveries were found to be out of all proportion more numerous than before, and continually increasing; the pecuniary saving of a household of working-people over that of a crowd of helpless beings raving in a state of coercion was very great; and of the difference in the comfort of each and all under the two systems, there can, of course, be no doubt. The Hanwell Asylum was not, even at first, the only one in which the humane and efficacious new method of treating insanity was

practised; but, as the metropolitan asylum, built at this date, it was the most conspicuous, as were the merits of Dr and Mrs Ellis, from their having been many years engaged and successful in the noble task of their lives.

But

We find during this period much improvement going on in drainage and enclosure of land, and extension of water-works. The Ewbank drainage, by which 9000 acres of land in Cardiganshire were reclaimed for cultivation, was completed in 1828, with its embankments, cuts, three miles of road, and stone bridge. In a small insular territory, the addition of 9000 acres to its area of cultivation is not an insignificant circumstance.-At the same date we find an achievement of somewhat the same kind notified in the records of the year, in those capital letters which indicate the last degree of astonishment. Chat Moss, lying in the line of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, was under treatment for the formation of the line; and we are told, that 'horses with loaded wagons, each weighing five tons, are constantly moving over those parts of the moss which originally would scarcely bear a person walking over it.'—The marvels of this first great English railway were opening upon the world by degrees. This solidifying of Chat Moss was enough at first. Next, we find that two locomotives were put to use on the works, to draw the marl and rock from the excavations, at a saving of nearly £50 a month in one case, and more in the other. the highest astonishment of all was experienced on occasion of the race of locomotives on the line, for a prize of £500, when the Rocket actually accomplished one mile in one minute and twenty seconds; being at the rate of forty-five miles an hour.' If men had been told at even that late date at what speed our Queen would be travelling twenty years later, they would have been as truly amazed as our great-grandfathers could have been at the notion of travelling from London to Edinburgh in a day. It is very interesting to observe how strong was the exultation, twenty years ago, when any improvement in road-making turned up; how anxious men were to publish new facts about the best methods of skirting hills, managing differences of level, and connecting the substructure and superstructure of the mail-roads, so as to facilitate to the utmost the passage of the mails. We find earnest declarations of the increase of postal correspondence, of the evils of delay, and of the benefits of rapid communication between distant places. These notices seem to us now clear indications of the approach of the railway age; but no one then knew it. What these complaints, and declarations, and desultory toils indicated, we can now recognise, but our fathersexcept a philosopher here and there-could not then foresee. Nor shall we perhaps learn philosophy from the lesson, nor perceive that every urgent want, every object of restless popular search, foreshews a change by which the want will be met, and the search rewarded. As men were anxiously and restlessly mending their old roads up to the very time of the opening of the great first English railway, so may we be complaining and toiling about some inadequate arrangement which needs

the civilised world. After the unparalleled issue which had amazed the book-trade for so many years, the competition for the property was yet keen; the whole were purchased by Mr Cadell for £8500; and he made them produce upwards of £200,000. What would the novelists of a century before-what will the novelists of a century hence, if such an order of writers then exists-think of this fact? Genius of a high quality finds or makes its own time and place; but still the unbounded popularity of Scott as a novelist seems to indicate some peculiar fitness in the public mind for the pleasure of narrative fiction in his day. And it might be so; for his day lay between the period of excitement belonging to the war, and that later one of the vast expansion of the taste for physical science, under which the general middle-class public purchases five copies of an expensive work on geology for one of the most popular novels of the time. Certain evidences, scattered through later years, seem to shew that while the study of physical science has spread widely and rapidly among both the middle and lower classes of our society, the taste for fiction has, in a great degree, gone down to the lower. Perhaps the novel-reading achieved by the middle classes during Scott's career was enough for a whole century; and in sixty years hence the passion may revive. To those, however, who regard the changes occurring in the office and value of literature, this appears hardly probable. However that may be, the world will scarcely see again, in our time, a payment of above £8000 for any amount of copyright of narrative fiction.

A great festival was held at Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1827, on Shakspeare's birthday, and the two following days-from the 23d to the 25th inclusive. There was a procession of Shakspeare characters, music, a chanting of his epitaph at the church, banquets, rustic sports, and a masquerade, chiefly of Shakspeare characters. Such festivalscommemorating neither political nor warlike achievement, but something better than eitherare good for a nation, and themselves worthy of commemoration in its history.

Some old favourites of the drama, or rather of the stage, went out during this period; and some new ones came in. Fawcett retired, after having amused and interested the crowd of his admirers for thirty-nine years; and Grimaldi, the unequalled clown, took his farewell in a prodigious last pantomime. There was something unusually pathetic in his retirement, however, sad as are always the farewells of favourite actors. He was prematurely worn out. As he said that night, he was like vaulting ambition-he had overleaped himself. He was not yet eight-and-forty; but he was sinking fast. I now,' he said, 'stand worse on my legs than I used to do on my head.' This was a melancholy close of the merriment of Grimaldi's night and of his career. But there is seldom or never an absence of favourites in the playgoing world. While, according to Lord Eldon, the sun of England was about to set for ever-while a Catholic demagogue was trying to force his way into parliament, to the utter destruction of Church

and State, and everything else-Lord Eldon thus writes: Amidst all our political difficulties and miseries, the generality of folks here direct their attention to nothing but meditations and controversies about the face, and figure, and voice, of the new lady who is come over here to excite raptures and encores at the Opera-house-namely, Mademoiselle Sontag. Hardly any other subject is touched upon in conversation, and all the attention due to Church and State is withdrawn from both, and bestowed on this same Mademoiselle Sontag. Her face is somewhat too square for a beauty, and this sad circumstance distresses the body of fashionables extremely.'

Mademoiselle Sontag did not stay very long; and her birdlike warblings were forgotten in the higher interest of the appearance of another Kemble the next year. The young Fanny Kemble, then only eighteen, came forward in October 1829, under circumstances which secured to her beforehand the sympathy of the public, as her name insured for her a due appreciation of her great talents. She came forward to retrieve her father's affairs, and those of Covent Garden Theatre; and her success was splendid. For two or three seasons, she was the rage. There were always those who, true to art, and loyal to Mrs Siddons, saw that her niece's extraordinary popularity could not last, unsustained as it was by the long study, experience, and discipline-to say nothing of the unrivalled genius-of Mrs Siddons; but the appearance of the young actress was a high treat, though a temporary one, to the London public. She went to America, and married there; and subsequent appearances in England have not revived the enthusiasm which her first efforts excited.

The dramatic world is not more sure of a constant succession of enthusiasms than the religious. It is at this time, in 1828, that we first hear of that extraordinary man who was soon to turn so many heads; the greater number by a passing excitement, and not a few by actually crazing them. The way in which we first hear of the Rev. Edward Irving is characteristic. It was by the fall of a church in Kirkcaldy, from the overcrowding of the people to hear him. The gallery fell, and brought down much ruin with it. Twenty-eight persons were killed on the spot, and one hundred and fifty more or less injured. Among the killed were three young daughters of a widowed mother, who never more lifted up her head, and was laid by their side in a few weeks. What Irving was as a sign of the times we shall have occasion to see hereafter; for, for seven years from this date, and especially during the first half of that period, he was conspicuous in the public eye, and doing what he could, under a notion of duty, to intoxicate the national mind. What he had been, up to the first burst of his fame, we know through the testimony of one who understood him well: What the Scottish uncelebrated Irving was, they that have only seen the London celebrated -and distorted-one can never know. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in