The one great improvement in London was Regent Street, from Portland Place and Regent’s Park to the statue an infatuated people erected to a shady Duke of York in Trafalgar Square. Just by there was the National Gallery, at any rate in a situation easy of access. Right past the Mansion House a new street had been made to London Bridge, and there the half-cracked King William was honoured by a statue, which was supposed to represent the Royal body and the Royal head. In Cornhill there was an old-fashioned building known as the Royal Exchange, which kept alive the memory of the great civic benefactor, Sir Thomas Gresham, and the maiden Queen; but everywhere the streets were narrow and the houses mean. Holborn Hill led to a deep valley, on one side of which ran a lane filled with pickpockets, and cut-throats and ruffians of all kinds, into which it was not safe for any one to enter. And as you climbed the hill you came to Newgate Market, along which locomotion was almost impossible all the early morning, as there came from the north and the south and the east and the west all the suburban butchers for their daily supply. Just over the way on the left was that horror of horrors, Smithfield, where on a market day some thousands of oxen and sheep by unheard of brutality had been penned up, waiting to be purchased and let loose mad with hunger and thirst and fright and pain all over the narrow streets of the city, to the danger of pedestrians, especially such as were old and feeble. Happily, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital was close by, and the sufferer had perhaps a chance of life. The guardians of the streets were the new police, the Peelers or the Bobbies as they were sarcastically called. The idiotic public did not think much of them; they were the thin edge of the wedge, their aim was to destroy the glorious liberty of every man, to do all the mischief they could, and to enslave the people. Was not Sir Robert Peel a Tory of the Tories and the friend of Wellington, so beloved by the people that he had to guard his house with iron shutters? At that time the public was rather badly off for heroes, with the exception of Orator Hunt, who got into Parliament and collapsed, as most of the men of the people did. Yet I was a Liberal—as almost all Dissenters were with the exception of the wealthy who attended at the Poultry or at Walworth, where John and George Clayton preached.