GREEN    LAND    FAR    AWAY	13
For though London was the greatest city in the world its
people still had their roots in the country or were separated only
by a generation or two from country ways. They were scarcely
yet sophisticated. The poorer streets were frequented by gigantic
brown dancing bears led by picturesque, seedy-looking Italians.
Barry, the clown at Astley's Circus, went down the Thames in a
washing tub drawn by geese, and a lady rider at Vauxhall could
draw all London. For children the chief sights of the town were
the Tower, the Elgin Marbles and Mr. Cross's Surrey Zoo,
recently moved from the old Royal Mews to make way for
Trafalgar Square. Here in the grounds of Walworth Manor
lions and tigers perambulated in a circular glass conservatory
more than a hundred yards wide and a giant tortoise carried
children on his back. Another popular treat was the Panorama.
At the Colosseum on the east side of Regent's Park one could
view the Fire of London with canvas scenery and fireworks and
the Alps with a real Swiss and a real eagle. Athens and the
Himalayas were also shown for a shilling—" the Ganges glittering
a hundred and fifty miles off, and far away the snowy peak of the
mountain it rises from." A little later a new Royal Panorama
was opened in Leicester Square, where scenes from England's
contemporary colonial wars were presented in the manner of a
modern news reel. The battle of Waterloo—the -chief title-deed,
with Trafalgar, of an Englishman's innate superiority to all
foreigners—was a permanent exhibit.
For sport the well-to-do Londoner affected the pastimes of
squires and farmers. Cricket was already established at Lord's
suburban ground and was played vigorously in top-hats: but
shooting parties, steeplechases, hunting with the Queen's, the Old
Berkeley or the Epping Hunt, and fishing up the river were far
more widely patronised. At Richmond the well-to-do merchant
and shopkeeper, arrayed in top-hat, white tie and long tail coat,
would sit in a punt of a Saturday afternoon perched on a chair
with rod and line, dining afterwards at the Star and Garter and
calling on the way home at the pastrycook's to buy his wife six-
penniworth of Maids of Honour. The ^Englishman, though
immersed in low commerce, liked above all to think of himself
as a man of potential acres—a younger son who might one day
come into his heritage. His, as Mr. R. H. Mottram has written,
was "that almost divine snobbery of very strong motive power
that keeps the Englishman from being content ever to be classed as