14 -ENGLISH SAGA

a workman or labourer, a priest or soldier or scholar, as men of
other civilisations are, and makes him always desire to be a
gentleman, a word without equivalent in any other lan-
guage."1

The old Chelsea bun house, the ale-house standing solitary in
the Kensington road between Hyde Park Corner and the royal
gardens, the ox that was roasted whole in the park on Coronation
Day, were all reminders that the capital of a great empire had not
wholly shaken off the village. So were the established bad
characters who frequented its shady gambling-houses and saloons,
the imitation bucks and dandies, the bankrupts, bullies and half-
pay captains who still, in the last age before the railway came in,
sometimes emulated Macheath and Turpin by robbing the be-
nighted traveller in Epping Forest* or on the Surrey heaths. On
an execution morning at Newgate one saw the rough old London
of the landless squatter—greasy, verminous and grimy—gathered
outside the gaol; ribaldry, coarse jokes, reckless drinking and
unashamed debauchery continued uproariously until the chimes
of St, Sepulchre's striking eight and the tolling of the prison bell
brought a momentary hush as the prisoner mounted the steps and
the sickly jerk of the rope gave the signal for an unearthly yell
of execration. For countrymen deprived of their land and status
soon degenerated.

So rough and ill-disciplined was that London that until
Home Secretary Peel had established his Metropolitan Police in
1829, St. James's Park had been patrolled by Household Cavalry.
Many still living could remember the terrible week when the
mob, emerging from its filthy lairs in the cellars and crazy
tenements of Blackfriars and St. Giles's, had surrounded Parlia-
ment and all but burnt the capital. When in the winter before her
coronation the little Queen, with pretty pink cheeks and pouting
mouth, drove behind her emblazoned guards through the streets,
the-crowd gaped but scarcely a hat was raised or a cheer heard.
"The people of England," wrote Greville, "seemed inclined to
hurrah no more." Even at Ascot in the following summer only a
few hats were raised as the royal barouche drove down the
course.

There were some in that age who thought England was
driving to a republic, for a hundred and fifty years the innate
English loyalty to the monarchic principle had been under-

1 Early Victorian England (Edited G. M. Young] /, 185*