6 ENGLISH SAGA

of the last age in which the English rich expended their wealth on
public pageantry instead of on personal comfort. The bedizened
flunkeys and the elegant, disdainful beings they attended never
lacked spectators: a nimbus of ragged wide-eyed urchins, some-
times jeering, always half-admiring, attended them wherever
they went—gamin school and spawn of the true Cockney with his
love of splendour and his delight in derision.

Here the ages mingled—the past and the future. The great
country houses of Piccadilly behind their high stone walls,
ignoring London and dreaming of the shires from which the rosy
country-bred lords and legislators who governed England
hailed, were washed by the ceaseless tides of the London
of commerce. Jogging past those tall brocaded eighteenth-
century windows, the fathers of the Forsytes sat crowded and
upright within or sprawled, long-legged and check-trousered, on
the narrow knife-edged roofs of the little sixpenny buses that,
driving a resolute Way among the crested barouches, chariots and
landaus of the fashionable west-end, plied between the Bank and
outer Paddington and Brompton or the Yorkshire Stingo close by
leafy Lisson Grove. At the back, straw in his mouth and ribaldry
on his lips, stood the outrageous cad, loudly touting for pas-
sengers against the conductors of rival machines and pushing his
clients, through the narrow door into his hot, swaying straw-
strewn pen.1 There they sat, six aside on the dirty plush cushions,
glaring suspiciously while their thoughts ranged ahead of the
steaming horses on schemes of money-making which never
troubled the fine pates of die great lords and ladies whose
residences they were humbly passing. For in the first days of the
young Queen new England was on the make and old England was
on the spend. The nation's growing wealth offered scope for-both.

Looking back across the first forty years of our own century
and the long prosperous reign that preceded it, we know how
vigorously and inevitably that young England was advancing to
victory, how doomed was the antique pomp and stately polity it
supplanted. At the time the battle seemed undecided: the founda-
tions of the old world looked firm and brassy and the busy,,
vulgar confusion of the new rootless and evanescent. The teeming

JIn May 1842 the stipendiary magistrate at the Marlborough Street Police Court
sentencing the conductor of one of Powell's Brentford omnibuses for an assault on a
passenger, "observed in very indignant tones that it was necessary to protect the public
and females in particular against the ruffianly conduct of omnibus conductors."
—Illustrated London Ntws, /, 46.