4 ENGLISH SAGA

while cows thrust their'horned heads over the wooden palings
of Carlton House Terrace. Trafalgar Square was building on the
recently cleared site of the old Royal Mews, where untidy adver-
tisement-pasted hoardings concealed the stump of Nelson's
slow-rising column and the Percy lion, with its straight poker
tail, roared defiance above the Tudor brick palace of the Dukes
of Northumberland.1 Farther afield loomed the great Pantech-
nicon in Bdgrave Square, and Apsley House, with its world-famous
inhabitant and its ferruginous shutters defying reform and
revolution, standing solitary against the country setting of Hyde_
Park. Beyond lay Kensington village and the first rising mansions
of Bayswater. Southwards towards the river were the Abbey and
the long straight line of Westminster Hall, but Barry's Houses of
Parliament were still only rising from the scaffolded ashes of
old St. Stephen's. Opposite that empty spot stood the eighteenth-
century houses of Bridge Street and Westminster Bridge; beyond
tall chimneys, bespeaking the industrial employments of the
dwellers in the Lambeth and Southwark suburbs, and the virgin
heights of woody Penge and Norwood.

This city, multiplying itself in every generation, was still
governed on the rustic model of its own past Side by side with
the medieval Lord Mayor and Corporation were three hundred
parish and other authorities, mostly Vestries, whose functions
overlapped in the most inextricable manner and whose members, .
self-elected or holding office for life under no less than 250 Acts of
Parliament, interpreted democracy in their own jovial way by
almost ceaseless entertainment at the public expense. The
hammering and plastering that daily enlarged London's circum-
ference went on without control or interference: except for the
new west-end squares which "Cubitt was raising for the Marquis
of Westminster, the small speculating builder built as he felt fit.
It was the age of "superior Dosset," carrying his yeoman frugality
and peasant notions of propriety into the building of a new. Rome.
Nobody had time or money to plan: there were no broad avenues
or boulevards: the town,free from continental fortifications, grew
outwards not upwards and on the principle that the best place to
build was the nearest available space. The brand new suburbs
which housed the City clerks over the former village pastures and

^Thirty jears later, it was still there, standing high above Landseer's lions in the
Square, and was reputed by mothers in their nursery tales to wag its tail as Big Ben
struck midnight.