The Sun.
London, England, 1856-07-10 00:00:00

MAYFAIR !

"It was now summer-time ; a grey, hot dusty evening.
They rode to the top of Oxford-street, and, there alighting,
dived in among the great streets of melancholy stateliness,
and the little streets that try to be as stately and succeed in
being more melancholy, of which there is a labyrinth near
Park-lane. Wildernesses of corner-houses, with barbarous
old porticoes and appurtenances ; horroris that came into ex-
istence under some wrong-headed person in some wrong.
headed time, still demanding the blind admiration of all en•
suing generations and determined to do so until they tum-
bled down ; frowned upon the twilight. Parasite little
tenements with the cramp in their whole frame, from the,
dwarf hall-doer on the giant model of his Grace's in the Square
to the squeezed window of the boudoir commanding the
dunghills in the Mews, made the evening doleful.
Ricketty dwellings of undoubted fashion, but of a capacity to
hold nothing comfortably except a dismal smell, looked like
the last result of the great mansions' breeding in-and-in ;
and, where there little supplementary bows and balconies
were supported on thin iron columns, seemed to be serail.
lously resting upon crutches. Here and there a Hatchment,
with the whole science of Heraldry in it, loomed down
upon the street, like an Archbishop discoursing on
Vanity. The shops, few iu number, made no show ; for
popular opinion was as nothing to them. The pastry-cook
knew who was on his books, and in that knowledge could be
calm, with a few glass cylinders of dowager peppermint drops
in his window, awl half a dozen ancient specimens of currant
jelly. A few oranges formed the greengrocer's whole conces-
sion to the vulgar mind. A single basket made of moss, once
containing plover's eggs, held all that the poulterer had to say
to the rabble. Everybody in those streets seemed (which is
always the case at that hour and season) to be gone out to
dinner, and nobody seemed to be giving the dinners they had
gone to. On the door-steps there were lounging, footmen
with bright parti-colored plumage and white polls, like an ex-
tinct race of monstrous birds ; and butlers, solitary men of re-
cluse demeanour. each of whom appeared distrustful of all other
butlers. The roll_of carriages in the Park was done for the
day ; the street lamps were lighting; and wicked little
grooms in the tightest fitting garments, with twists in their
legs answering to the twists in their minds, hung about in
pairs, chewing straw and exchanging fraudulent secrets. The
spotted dogs who went out with the carriages, and who were
so associated with splendid equipages, that it looked like a
condescension in those animals to come out without them, ae.
companied helpers to and fro on messages. Here and there
was a retiring public-house which did not require to be sup-
ported on the shoulders of people, and where gentlemen out
of livery were not much wanted."

What a capital notion that is, too, a little later
on, of one of the parasite streets in this locality,
being " long, regular, narrow, dull, and gloomy ;
like a brick and mortar funeral P.' And that
glimpse of a " little area gate, where a dejected youth
stood, spiking his chin on the summit of a precipi-
tous little shoot of wooden steps !" What a point-
cal account that is, moreover, given by Dickens of
the Court pensioners "located " in Hampton Court
Palace, with a record of their various ways and
means ! Hear him.—

" The venerable inhabitants of that venerable pile seemed
in those times to be eucamred thcr& like a sort of civilised
gipsies. There was a temporary air about their establish-
ments, as if they were going away the moment they could get
anything better ; there was also adissatisfied air about them-
selves, as if they took it very ill that they had not already
got something much better. Genteel blinds and make-shifts
were more or less observable as soon as their doors were
opened ; screens not half high enough, which made dining.
rooms out of arched passages, and warded off obscure corners
where footboys slept at night with their heads among the
knives and forks ; curtains which callea upon you to believe
that they didn't bide anything ; panes of glass which requested
you not to see them ; many objects of various forms, feign-
ing to have no connection with their guilty secret, a bed ;
disguised traps in walls, which were clearly coal-cellars ; af-
fectations of t.o thoroughfares, which were evidently doors to
little kitchens. Mental reservations and artful mysteries
grew out of these things. Callers, looking steadily into the
eyes of their receivers, pretended not to smell cooking three
feet off; people, confronting closets accidentally left open,
pretended not to see bottles; visitors, with their heads
against a partition of thin canvas and a page and a young
female at high- words on the other side, made believe to be
sitting in a primeval sileuco. There was no end to the small
social accommodation-bills of this uaturo which the gipsies of
gentility were constantly drawing upon, and accepting for,
one another."

Among which class of civilised Bohemians don't we
hear tell of one "courtly old lady, formerly
Beauty, and still sufficiently well favoured
to have dispensed with the powder on her nose,
and a certain impossible bloom under each eye"—,
and of " another old lady, dark-brewed and high-
noted, and mho must have had something real
about her or she could not have existed ; but it was
certainly not her hair, or her teeth, or her
figure, or her complexion !" These "pen-
cillints by the way" being apropos of
Arthur Clennam's introduction to the lady-mother
of the of owner of the objectionable
dog—to wit, Harry Gowan. Capital descriptionS
all of them, thes., about Mayfair and Hampton-
court—but will leaving as indisputably the gem
of the number, the charming, lovely, loveable,
love-chapter about "Nobody's Disappearance."