8 ENGLISH SAGA

rising commercial classes: at Lord Grey's house Creevey sat down
with five or six others to a luncheon of two hot roast fowls, two
partridges, a dish of hot beefsteaks and a cold pheasant, and to a
"double" dinner of two soups, two fishes, a round of beef at one
end of the table and a leg of mutton at the other with a roast
turkey on the sideboard, followed by entrees of woodcocks,
snipes and plovers, with devilled herring and cream cheese to lay
the last despairing stirrings of appetite. Dinner was followed,
after due time allowed for the gentlemen's port, by tea, and,
where late nights were in contemplation, by the supper
tray—Melton pie, oysters, sandwiches and-anchovy toast with
sherry, bottled stout and Seltzer-water and the usual mahog-
any case with its four cut-glass decanters labelled Rum, Brandy,
Whisky, Gin. The London poor, few of whom tasted butcher's
meat more than once a week, had to content, themselves with
envying the well-filled forms and rosy faces of their betters.

The poor—the flotsam and jetsam of casual labour and the
ne'er-do-wells who lacked the status and solider fare of the skilled
artisan class—were somewhat of a problem in that great city, and
the bigger it grew the more of them there were. The magnet of
wealth seeking more wealth drew them from the dissolving world
of status and the hedgerow, and from the old trades which the
new were paralysing. To house them the jerry builders worked
ceaselessly, raising innumerable straight streets of plain two-
storied houses with slated roofs, the cheapest that could be built.
Here, and in the regions where older and grander buildings had
decayed to verminous tenements, they lived and died and multi-
plied, for despite filth and cholera and typhus life proved stronger
than death. Even the down-and-outs and the homeless urchins,
sleeping in their thousands under the arches of the Adelphi and
Waterloo Bridge, lived.

Many of the worst slums jostled the dwellings of the rich and
the haunts of fashion. There were rookeries of thieves and
prostitutes under the very ttoses of the lawyers in the Temple and
the legislators in Westminster, and close behind the fine new
plate-glassed shops of Regent and Oxford Streets the urban
poor squatted in worse than farmyard filth and squalor. But
few troubled much about the poor who were left to the
Vestries #nd Providence: every one was too busy making money
or spending it. Only sometimes a wretched creature, rising
from the shadowy recesses of London or Waterloo Bridge,