The Express.
London, England, 1857-04-20 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Night Side of London. By J. EWING Itrreme.

In Mr. Ri*chic's little volume he professes (and
sets up to his profession) to give us much informa-
tion in a =all compass, and to show some of the
more prominent features of that life which he not
inaptly terms the Night Side of London—that life
so ghastly in its masquerade, where Pain hides its
writhing lips beneath the mask of Pleasure, and
Folly, with the wolf gnawing beneath its robe,
laagba madly, shaking in dreary dissonance the
bells upon its cap. Mr. Ritchie evidently knows
well the ground he travels over, discoursing often
vely sensibly, but sometimes, we fear, a little too
daymthally, by the way. We confess to thinking
that this peculiar class of literature has been some-
what ~ins of late rears, but Mr. Ritchie is a
peostimil 'hewer, and every phase of London life is
sot yet exlmostall. " London, c'cst one province
senverte els smdeons," remarks Horace Hay. "I
Imo sena the greatest wonder which the
mai sin thew to the astonished spirit," ex-
dims Reim ; " I have seen it, and am
sfitl sietookhod, and still there remains fixed in my
the stone forest of houses, and amid them
the na •
tss strum of faces of living men with all
Sir motley passions, all their terrible imbof
love, of hunger, and of hatred—l mean London."
Mr. Ritchie shows us London as she is when, es the
old song says, "respectable folk are abed ;" he
shows her in all her most attractive glitter, in all
her most deluging vice. We see the harlot old and
wrinkled, but with the night' rouge upon low
shodm with her gray • -temeosnier
and rags. Our author commenees " rounds"
from Cathsrine-street, of whose infamous dens he
speaks with a just indignation, reminding us that
its bffesay is of old date, having reached its height
in these delightful times when " fat old Florizel"
was kin. But now," says Mr. Ritchie, " the west
is the ass fleidesmble quarter, and the glory of
Cathoeiroolvset i fa" It is, however, still a sink
of Ties old depravity, and in the courts and a ley.
whisk deed in its neighbourhood exists a whole
sea of fissility which nightly overflows upon the
I =iitown- Clinging, like Don assphos, to the
sew golds, we are ecioduoted Ikea the west
to tie out, lima the north to Ohs sulk at our pent
meerepolis. slopping to pick op a certain timid
of knowledge ley way, from the troweled
Haymarket, where het youths are busily engsged
"seeing life," while they are labouring to deafroy it,
to the no less crowded highway of Ratcliff, w4ic
we find that " leek's alive" to everything but hie
own interest ; then to where the Eagle makes its
eyrie is the City-rood, a bird, is this case, decidedly
et nocturnal and obscene habits; from there, to those
abodes of harmony which neighbour the classic
Strand. to the Wee and restaurants of Leicester-
square, where Issues, aelf-entitled, of the barricades,
unbend their mighty souls with billiards, and where
hissute patriots " speak diggers but use none
eon to that abiding placedthe British gladiator, the
sporting public-house, down to the dirtier, but far
Isle disreputable free-and-cosy Of the coetermonger,
and so on from place to place, from scene to scene,
until we find ourselves at the conclusion of our
journey and the book, and which shows as a fit-
ting conclusion to such a " Night side" of life, the
police-court for its warning, and the prison or the
lunatic asylum for its goal.