A DOZEN NUISANCES OF LONDON.+ BY A PEDESTRIAN. I. BELLS OF ALL KINDS AND DESCRIPTIONS. I DO not object to the sound of the church-going bell of Cowper (though, to tell the truth, I always considered the phrase to be a bull, for I never yet knew of a bell that went to church); but I do object to the street-walking bells with the utmost vehemence. The postman-the dustman-the muffinman-all and sundry, are objects of my detestation. Have you ever had the misfortune of walking in the same line with one of these worthies along a street of any length? If you have, you will perfectly agree with me, particularly if you happened to have had a deaf man for your companion. The pretence for giving the privilege of splitting our ears to these peculiar persons, I never could comprehend. If the getting rid of your dust be a matter to be proclaimed by sound of bell, why not the getting in of your daily provender; and yet nobody arms the hand of the carborne butcher's boy with a jingling instrument to announce his approach. If the thin small voice of the muffineer's ring be justifiable, why is not the baker let loose upon us, to sound his quarterns into our cars! We should have all in the ring, or nothing. But the postman, you will say, is requisite, to remind the people of the necessity of having their letters ready. What is this but a bounty upon idleness, which should be contended against by the Malthusian philosophers, on the same principle that actuates them in their tenderhearted opposition to the poor laws. We need no such flappers for the twopenny post-nothing to suggest to us, that if we do not put our billet-doux to the fair Flora of the romantic region of Hampstead into the gaping letter-box of our neighbour, the cheesemonger, before four o'clock, she will be destined to retire to rest uncheered by our tender sentences, and deprived perhaps of sleep for the night-or, what is worse, haunted by hideous dreams of wandering lonely by herself upon the solitary shore. Nobody fancies that a general bell-ringing is requisite or necessary for this; how then can it be maintained that an army of redcoated tintinnabulists are called for to remind the greasy citizens of the time when their letters about calico, or cheese, From Fraser's Magazine.-No. X. or consols, or smoothing irons, or the other plebeian concerns, that can afford any pretext for writing to the provinces on a given day, has arrived. Depend upon it if the bell was suppressed, these rognes would not miss a post in the year for want of it. The consideration of this matter is humbly suggested to my friend Sir Francis Freeling. II. MACADAM. Lord Redesdale said in Ireland, some thirty years ago, that in that country there was one law for the rich and another for the poor; and, on a moderate calculation, this dictum of his lordship has been repeated thirty thousand times in various notes of indignation by patriots of the Emerald island ever since. But although an Irishman myself, I cannot claim so important a monopoly as this would be, for my own beautiful country-I happen never to have heard of any country in which the same might not be with most eminent justice asserted. A friend of mine, indeed, has suggested that England is an exception, because with us, instead of there being one law for the poor, and another for the rich-there is no law for the poor at all—the whole code being directed gainst them. Macadam is a case in point. This gentleman has torn the pavement out of the town with such complete success, that we are smothered with clouds of dust in summer, and obliged in winter to wade midleg through oceans of mud. To compensate for these inconveniences, the cab, we are assured, is more smoothly driven, and the carriage moves on its noiseless way with less detriment to its chances of duration. All very well for those who have cabs and carriages! but their convenience is secured by the stifling or staining of us who have neither. Again, the very silence of the motion is a source of misfortune to the walkers on foot. I remember, in the days of my youth, being much puzzled by a conundrum, "What is that which a carriage cannot go without, and yet is no use to it?" After considerable expense of Edipodean labour, I excogitated the answer, which is, "Noise." An answer no longer applicable. A carriage now comes upon us with the silence and speed of lightning, and you may know nothing about it until you find it thundering over you, and you are Juggernauted like my friend Huskisson. Mr. O'Connell moved last session for a return of all persons killed and wounded by the Irish police. I wish Mr. Goulburn would move for a return of the killed and wounded by Macadamization: it would be a subject worthy of his great mind. Here also are the poor sacrificed to the rich. I submit that there is nothing in Magna Charta that gives freeborn English men the right of being rode over. III. SOANE. See the Bank of England-his own house in Lincoln's Inn Fields-the Treasury-the whole of the Boeotian order of architecture. IV. NASH. See church in Langham Place-the Regent Mountain-the, &c. &c. &c.or rather avoid seeing them, on the same principle that deters squeamish people from visiting the Siamese boys, the armless girl, the Hottentot Venus, &c. If you have a taste for moustrosities, the case is otherwise. V. THE NEW WIDE STREETS. Tacitus says that the people of Rome charged the Emperor Nero with having widened the streets after the fire, of which they accuse him, out of a malicions design, of exposing them to the sun, and thereby breeding disorders in the city. Nobody can accuse Lord Lowther of being Nero, and yet I object vigorously to the universal pulling down of London. What an un sightly hole they have made at Charing Cross for example. I can understand why a great Place, as the French call it, should be made, for the purpose of ornamenting a large city; but why a row of shops should be pulled down with the view of doing nothing more than replacing them with another row of shops a few feet further back, is more than I can conjec ture. What does it signify whether Howel and James's is thirty feet or three hundred feet apart from Colnaghi's. The consequence is, that there is a cursed wind continually circumgyrating in these places with equal fury, no matter from which quarter it may be blowing elsewhere, which, when we couple it with the second nuisance, above enumerated, that of Macadamization, must be allowed to be intolerable. You have no shade to keep off the sun in summer, no screen to protect you from the rain in winter; and the difficulties of the crossing is much augmented, a matter of no trivial import. On the subject of large areas, let me remark that, I wish Russell Square was really (as certain wits wish it to be) an unknown land. But it is not. To gratify the acre spreading taste of the Duke of Bedford, whose heavy countenance illustrates the square, we have a gaping void, in which the wind and the sun play all manner of gambols. In the days of Sir Thomas Lawrenc, going to sit for your picture, was like visiting Sierra Leone at one period of the year, and Nova Zembla or Edinburgh, or some of these Hyperborean regions at another. Going to dine now with Sir Charles Flower, you experience the same inconvenience, but you brave it with more fortitude. VI. STREET MUSIC. This is an absolute calamity. There is one comfort, that the rogues do not attempt any real music, and therefore you escape comparatively unwounded. You feel no qualm of conscience at the performance, perhaps adequate, of the compositions of Bishop, or Stuart, or Blewitt, or Stevenson, or other illustrions authors of that class; but you feel a qualm of stomach. The majority of the Irish melodies played at their best, affect you with no slight degree of nausea-repeated in the street by the hurdy-gurdy grinders, and other itinerant dispensers of sour sounds, they make the hair stand on end. In the case when any thing that is music, such as the hunting chorus in Frieschutz, gets into their hands, we are so tortured by the damnable iteration, that we at last begin to think it something with "beautiful words written for it expressly by T. Moore, Esq.' Then the songs-"Home, sweet home,' stunned us for one year; "Cherry ripe," for another. "I'd be a butterfly," sung by a drunken thief in rags, much resembling a scare-crow, for a third; and so on-It is odd that the wandering minstrels never catch a song with any thing manly or hearty in it. The curse of gentility descends to all caterers for public applause. "We never dances our bears but to genteel tunes." The best song of the street I have heard for some years, was, "Jarvy, Jarvy!-Here am I, your honour." I always admired the felicity with which the interjectional "Tamaroo" was introduced. Haynes Bayley never wrote any thing like it. VII. THE WATER CARTS. Who manages these aquarii I know not. Their chief occupation appears to me to be the making of puddles in the street. GAS IN ALL SHAPES. A man of the name of Winsor has died lately, and a great splutter was set up in the newspapers, about the hard measure dealt to him in not having his claims to be the inventor of gas-lights duly acknow ledged. I hope the poor man has not gone to a region illuminated according to his patent; but, if he has, it is a well-merited fate. They tell me, that the streets are better lighted. They may be so; I never felt any inconvenience from their former comparative obscurity. But that is the sole advantage of the gaseous system, if it be one; in every other point of view gaslighting is a nuisance. Go where you will, you are poisoned by the smell. An odour bursts forth every now and thenat the theatre, for example-which would knock down a horse. In the streets, you are oppressed by a miasma, that invades you down to the bottom of your fauces, exciting a preternatural thirst. In a house, where the inhabitants are so ill-advised as to use gas-lights, you are in a complication of horiors. The machinery is never in order. Out go all the lights of the house at a whiff, leaving you, from attic to cellar, in Cimmerian darkness-some cockney wag having turned off the gas; or the lights keep dancing and winking, with a sort of hiccupy motion, owing to some derangement in the valves; or an awkward servant, with too liberal a finger, lets loose a volume of flame that puts you in mind of Vesuvius, and extorts a panic cry for fire-engines! or a tube bursts, or leaks, or fizzes, and you are poisoned with a smell, to which that of the Augean stable must have been perfume! VOL. VI. C In clubs, hotels, taverns, and other places where people feed, there might be a special act of parliament to forbid them. They actually destroy the taste of the dishes. It is said, that the gas poisons the fish in the river; of that I cannot speak; but I know, that it destroys its flavour on the table. X. ELECTIONS AND PUBLIC MEETINGS. But to These things-farces, as his highness calls them-happily occur in places where civilization or comfort is not expected to exist-Covent Garden, Smithfield, Spitalfields formerly, Kennington Common, Clerkenwell Green, &c. &c. &c. the passers by, in those places, what can be more odious? Here two fellows bawl against one another to the ale-conner, or coroner, or churchwarden, or some other trash, and "Vote for Figgins!" or, "Vote. for Wiggins!" is thrust down your throat at every corner." Make way for the elector" is cried by a hundred officious partisans. "How do you vote, sir!—the independant candidate sir! Magna charta!—Bill of Rights !—Freedom of the press! Liberty of fiddle-dee!" or, "The staunch old interest, sir!-The honour of the country! No radicals !" &c. &e. stun you on all sides. If you declare, you have no interest on either side, you run a chance of being beaten by both. Public meetings are, perhaps, a greater nuisance. If you be jammed in the crowd, there you stand until Heaven touches the heart of the orator to conclude, imbibing nonsense the most abominable, conveyed to you through an atmosphere of the vilest. odours. Your pocket is picked-your coat unskirted-your hat beaten in-and if you do not shout in applause of all that it pleases your neighbours to approve, you are cuffed in all directions by the friends of freedom of opinion. A sore throat or sore head is your only alternative. But thank God! these thingspublic meetings, I mean-are gradually being given up, (to write in the manner of the fine grammarians of the press). XI. THE STATIONARY ADVERTISERS. Why do those fellows thrust their papers into one's hand? Is there any reason for supposing I have such pressing need of the information they convey ?-If it must be done, why are they so parsimonious of their paper? XII. Have you ever noticed that these machines "Wallooing unwieldly, enormous in their gait," come in your way most perversely, when you are most in a hurry? If you have an assignation to keep, or a dun to avoid-a girl before or a tailor after yon-chuck comes a six-horsed caravan of coal, emerging from some corner, and laying an embargo on the rapidity of your motions, until the lady is out of your sight, or the fraction of linmanity upon your shoulder. On other occasions, when the velocity of movement is of no consequence, when you are neither the hunter nor his prey, you are unmolested. In like manner, what the citizens call a lock," never occurs but when you are bent on speed. A bill lies due in Lombard Street. The too punctual clerk has called in the morning, leaving his ominous bit of paper, concluding with, "Please call," (how civil that insidious word please), "between three and five"-having the fear of the notary before your eyes, and the bill, unfortunately, amounting to a sum of 201. 18.-which the drawer positively protests he cannot renew for the fifth time, you raise, with inconceivable difficulty, the proceeds at four, in Piccadilly; and hastening, on the wings of the wind, towards Temple Bar, take a coach to put you faster towards your destination. Fatal measure! A check of carriages from the various confluences of Fleet Market Farringdon Street, I mean-Ludgate Hill -Bridge Street-Fleet Street itself meeting at the Waitlimanian corner, keeps you tight as in a vice; and mangre all the efforts of your jarvey, and all his speed in getting forward, after being disentangled, you perceive, ou casting your anxious eye upon the clock of the quondam post-office in Lombard Street, within four steps of the Bank, that it is three minutes past five, and sigh somewhat for your loss of credit in the bill-market; and still more, for the fare of the hackney-coach, and the 3s. 6d. to be paid for the tiny quadrangle of paper at the corner of your bill in the morning. Or-but this is still more awful-running with a check upon a bank in dubious circumstances-caught in a storm of coaches-delayed-entangled-kept back -and at last, by super-human exertions, able to reach the door just in time to be told that it had stopped payment—and the rascal of a clerk, with a hypocritical scrape, condoling with you, by saying, "it was a pity you had not contrived to call a quarter of an hour before, when the sum being so small," &c. Jupiter confound him! This happened to myself—Poz ! THE SPOUSE OF SATAN.† THE painter Giotto was sitting alone in his studio one evening in the city of Pisa,' when a visitor was announced. Three months had hardly elapsed since Giotto's arrival in Pisa, yet had he the good fortune' to stand on the highest pinnacle of fashion. The young and the lovely of the nobility, flocked to his door; his studio was a gal lery of beauties; for she whose charms had not risen into new life beneath the magic hand of Giotto was supposed to have resigned her pretensions to rank among the lovely of Pisa. The rise of Giotto's fortunes had been sudden: the following pages record the events that so strangely terminated them. There lived, in the city of Pisa, a certain wealthy noble named Peruzzi. This man, at once the most wealthy and licentious of the nobility, had married the ugliest woman in Tuscany, attracted by her great riches; being now desirous of obtaining a papal bull to dissolve the marriage, he had conceived the singular design of sending to his holiness the pope, a portrait of his, wife, as an additional argument in his favour; the name of Giotto being in every body's mouth, the Count Peruzzi repaired to him on the night in question, resolved that he should be the painter of the portrait. "You are already celebrated," said he, as he entered Giotto's studio, "for your talents in depicting beauty; it is not, however, in that line that I have need of them. No doubt the same powers that so magically portray the lineaments of beauty, could also, and with equal effect, represent deformity. It is not necessary that I should explain the object I have in view; I have only to request that you will stretch your conception to the uttermost, while you paint for me a countenance more hideous than any that woman ever yet bore, and if you please we will make this bargain, that in proportion to your success shall be your reward; the more hideous the picture the better I shall be satisfied, and the greater the price I will pay for it." Giotto knew that the Count Peruzzi was the richest of the Pisan nobility; and although the task proposed + From Ackermann's Forget Me Not, for 1831.. was not much to his taste, for the charming countenances, that from the walls of his studio, were ever flashing beauty, had made him somewhat of a voluptuary, he was not so blind to his own interest as to decline the patronage of the Count Peruzzi; besides, he felt some desire to prove to the world, that although taste would confine his talents to one department, genius was capable of a wider range; he therefore engaged to fulfil the wishes of the count. When the painter of Pisa was left alone in his studio, he began to fear that he had undertaken a task to which he should be unable to do justice. It was in vain that he tried to conjure up in fancy a hideous countenance-his ima gination was alone conversant with bright eyes, and sunny smiles, and winning lips. If he shut his eyes, combinations of these alone rose to his fancy; if he opened them, beauty rained upon him from every side." I will walk into the street," said Giotto; "there I shall doubtless find assistance;" but no such portrait as he sought could be found; or, if fancying he had found an idea, he hurried to his studio, and tried to embody it on his canvass, it faded away in the light of his own beautiful and accustomed conceptions, or was lost in the blaze of the first countenance that flashed upon him as he entered his studio. Day after day Giotto laboured at his task, but with no greater success; his attempts to portray ugliness were only caricatures of beauty-the original conception was beauty still. Harrassed by disappointment, and worn by intense thought, late one evening Giotto threw himself upon his bed, bitterly bewailing his misfortune, and anticipating with no very enviable feelings the triumph that would be afforded to his rivals, if he should be found unequal to the performance of his task, or if the Count Peruzzi, dissatisfied with the result of his labours, should employ another artist. In the midst of these distracting thoughts, Giotto suddenly started from his bed, exclaiming "Ah! if I could but for one moment see that interdicted picture of Malfeo's, the Spouse of Satan"-an exclamation whose meaning requires to be explained. Shortly after painting had revived in the works of Leonardo da Vinci and his immediate followers, there lived at Pisa an artist named Malfeo. This man, having resolved to leave to posterity a picture that should render him immortal, long deli. berated upon the choice of a subject fitted for his purpose; and at length he resolved that his subject should be the "Spouse of Satan." During the progress of his work (which no one ever saw, as Malfeo laboured at it in secret), it was observed, that he occasionally showed symptoms of derange ment. His whole powers bent upon his work, strange and perhaps horrible conceptions of his subject became the inmates of his mind; and in the same moment that his picture was finished, reason forsook him. With his brush and pallet in his hand, he rushed from his studio into the street raving mad, and with fearful cries he sprung into the Aruo. Such was the end of Malfeo. It is said, that the first person who afterwards entered the studio of Malfeo was never more seen to smile: and that he, locking the door, that no one else might hazard his reason, carried the key to the archbishop, who, protected by divine favour, hastened to Malfeo's studio, and put a seal upon the door, thus preserving the inhabitants against the fatal effects of Malfeo's profanity. From the days of Malfeo to those of Giotto, the studio had remained closed, aud no one passed the sealed door, without devoutly crossing himself, and muttering an Ave. Let us now return to Giotto, who, as we have seen, suddenly started from his bed, exclaiming, "Ah! if I could but for one moment see that interdicted picture of Malfeo's, the Spouse of Satan!" "Giotto naturally enough supposed, that if he could see a picture which had already produced such powerful effects, and the conception of which was of so horrible a nature, as to have deranged the intellects of the painter, he should no longer have occasion to search for a subject for Count Peruzzi. Such was the idea that suddenly suggested itself to Giotto's mind. It was true, indeed, that no good Catholic would violate the interdicted and unhallowed depository of the profane picture; but Giotto was unfortu nately but an indifferent Catholic; and was notorious for his disregard of the injunctions of the church. It was even said that the cause of his coming to Pisa was not voluntary; but that having caricatured a certain picture of the Virgin, he had been forced to quit his native town. Having none of the reasons, therefore, of a good Catholic to deter him from violating Malfeo's studio, he had scarcely formed the wish to see the picture, before he resolved upon accomplishing it. The soft beams of a Tuscan moon lighted Giotto along the Lung Arno, and to the centre bridge of marble, upon which he paused for a moment, to look back upon the beautiful crescent that extended along the river. All was silent and lovely. The Arno flowed dimpling on, tremulous beneath the moonlight, which streamed upon the marble of a hundred palaces. " I am haunted by images of beauty," said Giotto; "let me hasten onward to displace them ;" and Giotto hurried forward, |