Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; London (England) -- Description and travel
The Klem species are incapable of the softer emotions; probably, in that
low nomadic race, the softer emotions have all degenerated into flue.
But, with this exception, all the sharers of my retreat make love.
I have mentioned Saville-row. We all know the Doctor’s servant. We all
know what a respectable man he is, what a hard dry man, what a firm man,
what a confidential man: how he lets us into the waiting-room, like a man
who knows minutely what is the matter with us, but from whom the rack
should not wring the secret. In the prosaic “season,” he has distinctly
the appearance of a man conscious of money in the savings bank, and
taking his stand on his respectability with both feet. At that time it
is as impossible to associate him with relaxation, or any human weakness,
as it is to meet his eye without feeling guilty of indisposition. In the
blest Arcadian time, how changed! I have seen him, in a pepper-and-salt
jacket—jacket—and drab trousers, with his arm round the waist of a
bootmaker’s housemaid, smiling in open day. I have seen him at the pump
by the Albany, unsolicitedly pumping for two fair young creatures, whose
figures as they bent over their cans, were—if I may be allowed an
original expression—a model for the sculptor. I have seen him trying the
piano in the Doctor’s drawing-room with his forefinger, and have heard
him humming tunes in praise of lovely woman. I have seen him seated on a
fire-engine, and going (obviously in search of excitement) to a fire. I
saw him, one moonlight evening when the peace and purity of our Arcadian
west were at their height, polk with the lovely daughter of a cleaner of
gloves, from the door-steps of his own residence, across Saville-row,
round by Clifford-street and Old Burlington-street, back to
Burlington-gardens. Is this the Golden Age revived, or Iron London?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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