10 ENGLISH SAGA

folk who wished to be free and easy. But already the shades of a
more prim and decorous age were falling: the new police and
the new passion for making laws had .begun to trace on the
nation's ruddy face the sober lineaments of a more formal society.
In Oxford Street the first wood blocks had already taken the place
of the cobbles, and in the larger thoroughfares the stone posts on
the pavements were being crowned with spikes to discourage the
urchins of the streets from their interminable leapfrog. The day-
long music of the London street cries was beginning to grow
fainter.

Within the club-houses of Pall Mall and St. James's, a new
life for the rich, based on decorum and silerit comfort, was
taking the place of the noisy gambling and- drinking of the
unregenerate past. By 1837 there were twenty-five of these great
institutions from behind whose windows warm men with broad
acres or- money in the Funds could sit over their Quarterly or
Edinburgh Review and watch a safer and remoter world than their
fathers had ever known. Here the old and the new were already
learning to mingle, and the successful man of commerce who had
negotiated the terrors of the black ball might hope to strike an
acquaintance with the quieter sort of lord or squire. There was
even a special dub dedicated to Reform with the most famous
chef in London installed among tin-lined copper pots and gas
ovens to teach old England the way to live after a new French
model.

• • • • « • • •'

At night the march of progress was symbolised by the lighting
of the London streets. Gas lighting had come in a couple of
decades back, and was now being slowly extended from the
main thoroughfares into the courts and alleys of the older London
that besieged them. The great gasometers rose like fortresses
above the drab rows of working-class dwellings, and from dusk till
dawn the flaring gas jets made a peculiar humming that was the
musical background to the nocturnal activities of the Londoner.
Judged by modern standards the light they gave was dim and
little diffused: to our rustic forefathers it seemed a prodigious
illumination. Yet four years were to elapse before the main
road from Hyde "Park Corner to Kensington was lit by a single
lamp.

The essential services of life were still supplied to the Londoner
after a country model. Donkeys carried vegetables to Covent