It has been said, that “few men know how to take
a walk.” In London it requires some experience to
know where to take a walk. The taste of the perambulator,
the hour of the day, and the season of the
year, would each affect materially the decision of the
question.

If you are up early—I mean early for London—say
ten o'clock—we would start from your hotel in Bond
street, and hastening through Regent street and the
Quadrant (deserts at that hour), strike into the zigzag
of thronged alleys, cutting traversely from Coventry
street to Covent Garden. The horses on the cabstand
in the Haymarket “are at this hour asleep.”
The late supper-eaters at Dubourg's and the Café de
l'Europe were the last infliction upon their galled
withers, and while dissipation slumbers they may find
an hour to hang their heads upon the bit, and forget
gall and spavin in the sunshiny drowse of morning.
The cabman, too, nods on his perch outside, careless
of the custom of “them as pays only their fare,” and
quite sure not to get “a gemman to drive” at that unseasonable
hour. The “waterman” (called a “water
man,” as he will tell you, “because he gives hay to
the 'orses”) leans against the gas-lamp at the corner,
looking with a vacant indifference of habit at the
splendid coach with its four blood bays just starting from
the Brighton coach-office in the Crescent. The sidewalk
of Coventry street, usually radiant with the
flaunting dresses of the fail and vicious, is now sober
with the dull habiliments of the early-stirring and the
poor. The town (for this is town, not city) beats its
more honest pulse. Industry alone is abroad.

Rupert street on the left is the haunt of shabbygenteel
poverty. To its low-doored chop-houses steal
the more needy loungers of Regent street, and in confined
and greasy, but separate and exclusive boxes,
they eat their mutton-chop and potato, unseen of their
gayer acquaintances. Here comes the half-pay officer,
whose half-pay is halved or quartered with wife
and children, to drink his solitary half-pint of sherry,
and over a niggardly portion of soup and vegetables,
recall, as well as he may in imagination, the gay dinners
at mess, and the companions now grown cold—in
death or worldliness! Here comes the sharper out
of luck, the debtor newly out of prison. And here
comes many a “gay fellow about town,” who will dine
to-morrow, or may have dined yesterday, at a table of
unsparing luxury, but who now turns up Rupert street
at seven, cursing the mischance that draws upon his
own slender pocket for the dinner of to-day. Here
are found the watchful host and the suspicious waiter—
the closely-measured wine, and the more closely
measured attention—the silent and shrinking company,
the close-drawn curtain, the suppressed call for
the bill, the lingering at the table of those who value
the retreat and the shelter to recover from the embarrassing
recognition and the objectless saunter through
the streets. The ruin, the distress, the despair, that
wait so closely upon the heels of fashion, pass here
with their victims. It is the last step within the
bounds of respectability. They still live “at the West
end,” while they dine in Rupert street. They may
still linger in the park, or stroll in Bond street, till
their better-fledged friends flit to dinner at the clubs,
and within a stone's throw of the luxurious tables and
the gay mirth they so bitterly remember, sit down to
an ill-dressed meal, and satisfy the calls of hunger in
silence. Ah, the outskirts of the bright places in life
are darker for the light that shines so near them!
How much sweeter is the coarsest meal shared with
the savage in the wilderness, than the comparative
comfort of cooked meats and wine in a neighborhood
like this!

Come through this narrow lane into Leicester
square. You cross here the first limit of the fashionable
quarter. The Sablonière hotel is in this square;
but you may not give it as your address unless you
are a foreigner. This is the home of that most miserable
fish out of water—a Frenchman in London.
A bad French hotel, and two or three execrable
French restaurants, make this spot of the metropolis
the most habitable to the exiled habitué of the Palais
Royal. Here he gets a mocking imitation of what, in
any possible degree, is better than the sacré biftek, or
the half-raw mutton-chop and barbarous boiled potato!
Here he comes forth, if the sunshine perchance for
one hour at noon, and paces up and down on the sidewalk,
trying to get the better of his bile and his bad
breakfast. Here waits for him at three, the shabby,
but most expensive remise cab, hired by the day for
as much as would support him a month in Paris.
Leicester square is the place for conjurors, birdfanciers,
showmen, and generally for every foreign
novelty in the line of nostrums and marvels. If there
is a dwarf in London, or a child with two heads, or a
learned pig, you will see one or all in that building, so
radiant with placards, and so thronged with beggars.

Come on through Cranbourne alley. Old clothes,
second-hand stays, idem shawls, capes, collars, and
ladies' articles of ornamental wear generally: cheap
straw-bonnets, old books, gingerbread, and stationery!
Look at this once-expensive and finely-worked muslin
cape! What fair shoulder did it adorn when these
dingy flowers were new—when this fine lace-edging
bounded some heaving bosom, perhaps, like frost-work
on the edge of a snow-drift. It has been the property
of some minion of elegance and wealth, vicious or virtuous,
and by what hard necessity came it here? Ten
to one, could it speak, its history would keep us standing
at this shop window, indifferent alike to the curious
glances of these passing damsels and the gentle
eloquence of the Jew on the other side, who pays us
the unflattering compliment of suggesting an improvement
in our toilet by the purchase of the half-worn
habiliments he exposes.

I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of
Venice. The half-daylight between the high and
overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and
occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of
hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the
absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the
damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to
those close passages in the rear of the canals between
St. Mark's and the Rialto. Then I like studying a
pawnbroker's window, and I like ferreting in the old
book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in
humility for an author to see what he can be bought
for in Cranbourne alley. Some “gentle reader,” who

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has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you
for two-and-sixpence. For three shilling you may
have the three volumes, “as good as new,” and the
shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the
terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy
Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity
with the eighteen-pence of the remainder.

The labyrinth of alleys between this and Covent
Garden, are redolent of poverty and pot-houses. In
crossing St. Martin's lane, life appears to have become
suddenly a struggle and a calamity. Turbulent
and dirty women are everywhere visible through the
open windows; the half-naked children at the doors
look already care-worn and incapable of a smile; and
the men throng the gin-shops, bloated, surly, and repulsive.
Hurry through this leprous spot in the vast
body of London, and let us emerge in the Strand.

You would think London Strand the main artery
of the world. I suppose there is no thoroughfare on
the face of the earth where the stream of human life
runs with a tide so overwhelming. In any other
street in the world you catch the eye of the passer-by.
In the Strand, no man sees another except as a solid
body, whose contact is to be avoided. You are safe
nowhere on the pavement without all the vigilance of
your senses. Omnibuses and cabs, drays, carriages,
wheelbarrows, and porters, beset the street. Newspaper-hawkers,
pickpockets, shop-boys, coal-heavers,
and a perpetual and selfish crowd dispute the sidewalk.
If you venture to look at a print in a shop-window,
you arrest the tide of passengers, who immediately
walk over you; and, if you stop to speak with a friend,
who by chance has run his nose against yours rather
than another man's, you impede the way, and are
made to understand it by the force of jostling. If you
would get into an omnibus you are quarrelled for by
half-a-dozen who catch your eye at once, and after
using all your physical strength and most of your discrimination,
you are most probably embarked in the
wrong one, and are going at ten miles the hour to
Blackwell, when you are bound to Islington. A
Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit
mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory
journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any
man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years
of age, and he will entertain you, from the soup to the
Curaçoa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties
with cads and coach-drivers.