patrol. Some are knocked down, others stabbed, others cut and carbonadoed." Gay has given his testimony to the existence of the same association: "Now is the time that rakes their revels keep, His scatter'd pence the flying Nicker * flings, And with the copper shower the casement rings. Safe from their blows or new-invented wounds?" We have a Mohock or two still left; and sometimes our magistrates are still weak enough to inflict a miserable money penalty, instead of honestly levelling all distinctions amongst those made equal by crime and folly. But we have no fraternity of Mohocks. A firm police will root up the last of the race. Some thirty years after the Spectator had described the Mohocks, Johnson gave us a picture, in his London,' of the individual bully: "Prepare for death if here at night you roam, This then (1738) was the age of flambeaux and linkboys. London had only still its lanthorns here and there, and its few glass lamps. Westminster was perhaps worse provided. But the coach rolled from the theatre and the ball with its liveried torch-bearers; and even the present century has seen flambeaux in London. The intelligent antiquary-not he who discovers nothing of antiquity but what is buried in the earth or described in the classics-may behold a relic of the manners of a hundred years ago in some of our existing squares and streets, that have stood up against the caprices of fashion. On each side the door-way, and generally attached to the posts that carry an arching lamp-rail, are two instruments that look like the old tin horn of the crier of " great news." They are the flambeau-extinguishers: and when the gilded coach was dragged heavily along at midnight to the mansion (people of fashion once went to bed at midnight), and the principal door was closed upon the lords and ladies of the great house, the footmen thrust their torches into these horn-like cavities, and as the horses moved off by instinct to their stables, the same footmen crept down the area in utter darkness. There was perhaps a solitary linkboy at the corner of the square, especially if an opened cesspool, or a little lake of mud, promised a locality where gentlemen without his aid might break their necks or soil their stockings. But he generally hovered about the theatres and taverns. He was, too often, a half-idiotic wretch, whose haggard features have been admirably preserved by Boitard, an artist of Hogarth's period, who possessed some share of the Hogarthian humour. Gay describes "the officious link boy's smoky light;" but he has also given the fraternity a bad character, which perhaps they were enabled to live down. The poor fellow of Boitard's picture we are sure did not deserve the reproach: "Though thou art tempted by the linkman's call, In the mid-way he 'll quench the flaming brand, Still keep the public streets, where oily rays, Shot from the crystal lamp, o'erspread thy ways." Oily rays, and crystal lamps! The very existence of the "linkmen" and "the pilfering band" tells us to what extent the illumination reached, and what were dignified by the name of " public streets." But the age of lamps was really approaching. The City, as we see, became vigorous in lighting, when it was found that severity did little against the thieves; and the Westminster Paving and Lighting Act was passed in 1762. Then came the glories of the old lamplighters;-the progress through each district to trim the wicks in a morning-and the terrible skurry, with ladder driven against your breast, and oil showered upon your head, as twilight approached. What a twinkling then was there through all the streets! But we were proud of our lamps; and Beckmann, in his History of Inventions,' has described them as something like a wonder of the world. Beneath the faint lamp slept the watchman; or if he walked, he still walked with his lanthorn; and the link boy, yet a needful auxiliary to the lamp and the lanthorn, guided the reeling gentleman from his tavern to his lodging. The old system of watching lasted up to 1830. It is impossible to conceive any institution more unfitted for the demands of society, more corrupt, more inefficient ;-in a word, as it was described by all parties before the passing of Sir Robert Peel's Police Act, it was an intolerable nuisance. It is amazing how it could have lasted so long; and its duration can be accounted for upon no other principle than that, it being agreed on all hands that it was utterly worthless and contemptible, means were resorted to for rendering the police of London in some degree efficient, whilst those reverend pensioners, who had only the duty to discharge of having their lanthorns broken (sometimes their heads), and of springing their rattles duly at the midnight hour, row or no row, were held to be entirely without responsibility in the serious matters of burglary and street-robbery. These were left to the inspection of the officers of Bow Street; and very vigilant had these functionaries been for some thirty years. There was no such thing as a mounted highwayman known in the neighbourhood of London; streetrobberies had become very rare; burglaries were not common. The face of things had been wonderfully changed since the London thieves plotted to stop Queen Anne's coach as she returned from supper in the city; and since highwaymen committed robberies in noon-day in the immediate vicinity of the capital, and slowly rode through the villages without any one daring to stop them. But the application of a scientific discovery had as much to do with some of these beneficial results as the greater vigilance of a police. When London became lighted with gas, half the work of prevention of crime was accomplished. It is pleasant to think what has been done in this matter in our own day. Birmingham, Halifax, Manchester, had employed gas as a means of lighting manufactories very early in the present century; but London first adopted this beautiful light in her public streets. Pall-Mall was thus illuminated in 1807; and we certainly owe this application of the invention (although to the invention itself he can have no claim) to the sanguine perseverance of a German, named Winsor. He raised a subscription of 50,000l. for his experiments; and not a penny came back to the subscribers. But he lighted a street. For several years Pall-Mall alone was so lighted. His extravagant expectations of enormous profits to his subscribers had utterly failed; but the principle could not fail. The business of the first chartered company was also long unprofitable; but in fourteen years they had conquered every difficulty. Other companies were rapidly established; and the metropolis now burns gas in every square, street, alley, lane, passage, and court. It was shown in 1823, upon a parliamentary investigation into the affairs of the chartered company, that they produced six hundred and eighty thousand cubic feet of gas every night, giving a light equal to thirty thousand pounds of tallow candles. The consumption of the metropolis is now reckoned at nearly nine millions of cubic feet in twenty-four hours; so that the production of gas in London every night is equal to the light of four hundred thousand pounds of tallow candles. Compare this with the one "candle with a cotton wick," hung up here and there, from six to eleven o'clock on dark nights. In 1736, when public lamps were to a certain extent established, the City had only one thousand throughout all its great thoroughfares and numberless lanes and alleys. Should we err in saying that the light of these thousand lamps was not more than equal to that of one hundred pounds of tallow candles? This slight computation supplies food for thought. But if the nightly illumination of London is to be presented to the mind in a picturesque shape, let us recollect how Richard Niccols described the illumination of the bonfires and cresset-lights of Midsummer-Eve, startling the shepherd tending his flocks on the neighbouring hills. There is a nobler and far more brilliant illumination now lighting up this mighty city, from sunset to sunrise every night throughout the year. The noblest prospect in the world is London from Hampstead Heath on a bright winter's evening. The stars are shining in heaven, but there are thousands of earthly stars glittering in the city there spread before us: and as we look into any small space of that wondrous illumination, we can trace long lines of light losing themselves in the general splendour of the distance, and we can see the dim shapes of mighty buildings afar off, showing their dark 3 5 1 1 ST. C... 1 masses amidst the glowing atmosphere that hangs over the capital for miles, with the edges of flickering clouds gilded as if they were touched by the first sunlight. This is a spectacle that men look not upon, because it is common; and so we walk amidst the nightly splendours of Cheapside, and forget what it was in the days of Marching Watches. But in all these things we may trace the progressive growth of a principle. A city has made some progress in civilisation when its institutions are sufficiently compact for men to be agreed upon union for their common safety. It has made a great progress when that union, however imperfectly directed, exhibits itself in occasional magnificence amidst habitual poverty of expenditure. There is another stage when the pomp is abandoned, and the capital wasted upon it is dedicated to some general improvement. The extent of the improvement is a question only of time. The two thousand cressetlights of the Midsummer-Eve of 1510, and the thousands upon thousands of the nightly gas-lights of 1841, are not so widely separated as the lapse of three hundred years might appear to say. They are to be associated as much as they are to be contrasted. The lamplighter of 1800 appears to belong almost as little to our own day as the ancient cresset-bearer. |
