Andrew Wynter

“ Everything that we see about us, from the primal granite rocks to the child’s toy which ministers to the whim of the moment, is by a slow process of disintegration passing away into a fine dust, which goes on for ever, building up the crust of the globe—a fine dust which in the course of time becomes animated with verdant sod, and to all appearance silently obliterates the marks which humanity is ever graving upon its surface, or building or shaping with its pigmy hands. ”

“ Without the coal and the iron, the copper and the tin, they toilfully evolve from vast depths, England would be but a third-rate power. A life so cheerless, and yet so useful—nay, essential, to our national existence—should at least receive at the hands of the Government every protection that can be thrown around it; yet, if we follow the miner into his gallery and working cell, we are amazed at the dangers and the difficulties which are needlessly thrust upon him in the black realm in which he moves and has his being. ”

“ How little did we ever dream that in so doing we were calling into life one of the most subtle, active, and universal agents in nature—a spirit like Ariel to carry our thoughts with the speed of thought to the uttermost ends of the earth—a workman more delicate of hand than the Florentine Cellini, and more resistless in force than the Titans of old! ”

“ We fold up and carry in our cerebrum the scenes and incidents of years of travel; we summon at will the faces of thousands of persons, who have been seen by us only for a moment; we invert our mental vision, and there upon the tablet of the brain we see as vividly as in a camera, the groupings of scenes that have occurred in eventful periods of our lives. How are all these myriads of images written upon the grey matter of the brain, and so ordered, sorted, and grouped that we can select exactly those we want from the immense store, without disturbing the remainder? ”

“ It is interesting to watch the slow degrees by which the advent of Old Father Christmas is made known. The grocer, for weeks before, makes preparations. His windows are burdened with hills of currants; a desert of brown sugar spreads away into the interior; there is an attempt at modelling the human form divine, in the shape of a man constructed of a dropsical-looking citron stuck upon two cinnamon legs. But art has penetrated even into the domain of the grocer in the shape of bonbon cases from Paris, in which sweets to the taste are daintily wrapped up in sweets to the eye. ”

“ There is no more touching sight at Colney Hatch than to notice the manner in which the female lunatics have endeavoured to diversify the monotonous appearance of their cell-like sleeping-rooms with rag dolls, bits of shell, porcelain, or bright cloth placed symmetrically in the light of the window-sill. The love of ornament seems to dwell with them when all other mental power is lost; and they strew gay colours about them with no more sense, but with as much enjoyment, as the bower-bird of the Zoological Gardens adorns his playing-bower. ”

“ It is the infinite subdivision of the scent which gives it its true value as a perfume. Some astounding tales have been told of the persistence of scents, but we know that some of them have outlived the memory of great empires, and probably will yet exist when the New Zealander takes his seat on the broken arch of London Bridge: there is to be seen at Alnwick Castle a jar of perfume, at least three thousand years old, which still gives out a perfume. We know no better illustration of the infinite divisibility of matter than is afforded by the history of some of the more persistent perfumes. ”

“ As early as two o’clock in the morning, a person looking down the dip of Piccadilly will perceive the first influx of the daily supply of vegetables and fruit to Covent Garden market: waggons of cabbages, built up and regularly faced, with the art rather of the mason than the market-gardener; light spring-vans fragrant with strawberries; and milk-white loads of turnips which slowly roll along the great-western road, and bring the produce of the fertile alluvial shores of the Thames to the great west-end mart. ”

“ The life of a coroner in a mighty metropolis like London must be an odd one. His grim duty leads him day by day into palace and cottages, back-slums and noble mansions. In a certain sense he is a modern Charon, whose pass is required ere a company of corpses, some days more, some days less, can find quiet burial. They say ghosts listen for the sound of the crowing cock before they retreat to their narrow beds, so mortals, suddenly deprived of life, must have the permit of twelve good men and true, and the coroner’s signature, ere the sexton will lift a shovel in their behalf. ”

“ Around the whole quadrangle, during a busy morning, there is a party-coloured fringe of waggons backed in towards the central space, in which the light green of cabbages forms the prevailing colour, interrupted here and there with the white of turnips, or the deep orange of digit-like carrots; and as the spectator watches, the whole mass is gradually absorbed into the centre of the market. Meanwhile the space dedicated to wholesale fruit sales is all alive. Columns of empty baskets twelve feet high seem progressing through the crowd “of their own motion.” ”

“ How near the chit-chat of a newspaper brings you to past events,—you can’t help feeling yourself a contemporary. What life and movement; what petty details, all of which, however, are necessary to fill up the picture of the time, and to clothe the bones which history picks so bare. ”

“ The performance of domestic offices, the society of the goodwife and goodman, and the influence of the children, would do far more to restore the disordered brain of the lunatic—pauper or otherwise—than all the organization of the asylum, with its daily routine, proceeding with the inexorable monotonous motion of a machine, and treating its inmates rather as senseless atoms than as sentient beings, capable, though mad, of taking an interest in things around them, and especially awake to the pleasure of being dealt with as individuals rather than as undistinguishable parts of a crowd. ”

“ The art of Cookery is, something like the egg-trick of Columbus, very easy when some one has shown us how to do it; but it certainly is strange that in all our rage for teaching the people “common things,” one so common and yet so important should never have been hit upon.
Of all the employments of women, what so important as that of cooking? but we hear nothing about it from Miss Emily Faithfull; yet it is of infinitely greater importance that they study the art of feeding the body in a wholesome manner than that they should take to printing, which they cannot do better than men. ”

“ Those who remember old Billingsgate, with its tumble-down wharf, and dock half choked with corruption and oyster-shells—a dirty remnant of the days of Elizabeth—will enter with pleasure Mr. Bunning’s new market. Through its Italian colonnade are seen the masts of the fishing smacks, and the brown wharves of the opposite side—a pleasing picture, which instantly fixes the artistic eye. The busy scene within the market between the hours of five and seven in the morning, is one of the marvels of the metropolis. ”

“ For the small sum of half-a-crown you may in the summer season leave hot and dusty London behind you, traverse the South Downs, skirt the South coast, spend a day in the great naval arsenal of Portsmouth, and be back again in town to a late tea—that is, those who like cheap trips and this kind of racing within an inch of their lives, may do so if they like—which I do not. ”

“ There seems to be no fear that a London mob will ever prove a serious thing in the face of our present corps of policemen. A repetition of the Lord George Gordon riots would be an impossibility. Those who shudder at the idea of an outbreak in the metropolis, containing two millions and a half of people and at least fifty thousand of the “dangerous classes,” forget that the capital is so wide that its different sections are totally unknown to each other. A mob in London is wholly without cohesion, and the individuals composing it have but few feelings, thoughts, or pursuits in common. ”

“ A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,
when one sees our race of dogs reduced by extraordinary care to the utmost conceivable pitch of ugliness, and to find people—reputed to be knowing ones—actually believing in that ugliness as the acme of perfection and beauty? Thank God, the utmost effort of the breeder’s art cannot make anything but a noble gentleman out of the bloodhound. How judicially the few hounds of this class carried themselves! ”

“ The terrible contest of the succeeding reign was the hotbed which forced the press of this country into sudden life and extraordinary vigour. Those who have wandered in the vaults of the British Museum and contemplated the vast collection of political pamphlets and the countless Mercuries which sprang full armed, on either side of the quarrel, from the strong and earnest brains which wrought in that great political trouble, will not hesitate to discover, amidst the hubbub of the Rebellion, the first throes of the press of England as a political power. ”

“ Who that has seen a lifeboat put forth in the very fury of a storm but has watched this fight with the elements with intense excitement! Who that has seen the same boat return, laden with rescued human life, but has felt a sublime emotion such as we experience only by witnessing the most heroic acts! ”

“ The polka, the waltz, and the mazurka, performed with grace and ease, declare the social standing of the assembly; and many a pedestrian who sees the dark silhouettes of the dancers as they whirl across the light, is astonished at the festivities of the inmates. In the summer evenings the spacious courts are crowded with the patients, not gloomily walking between four dismal walls in which the very air seemed placed under restraint, but enjoying themselves in the bowling-green or in the skittle alley. The garden is at hand for those who love the culture of flowers. ”

“ If we would still continue our survey of the sad mischances to which poor humanity is subject, let us glance at the curious skeleton in which all the bones are anchylosed, or knotted together by osseous growth, so as to be tied into a perfectly immobile knot. Again, we may see bones so brittle that they fly to pieces on the least strain, like the glass toy known as a Prince Rupert’s drop, or arteries so solidified that in life they must have clasped and stifled in their solid grip the labouring and heaving human heart. ”

“ The scene which a London fire presents can never be forgotten: the shouts of the crowd as it opens to let the engines dart through it, the foaming head of water springing out of the ground, and spreading over the road until it becomes a broad mirror reflecting the glowing blaze—the black, snake-like coils of the leather hose rising and falling like things of [Pg 402] life, whilst a hundred arms work at the pump, their central heart, the applause that rings out clear above the roaring flame as the adventurous band throw the first hissing jet ”

“ If these facts will not permit us to look upon Captain Fowke’s building as a packing-case, what shall we say of it as a casket, as a jewel-case prepared to receive, for perhaps a century to come, the decennial congregations of the wealth of the globe? When the secret power presiding at the South Kensington Museum undertook to create this structure destined to be the cynosure of foreign eyes, and when the behest went forth from the very cradle of art design in this country, the world anticipated some triumph of artistic skill. ”

“ There is no nobler or more national sight in our island than to behold the procession of stately vessels as they pass in panoramic pride along our shores, or navigate the great arterial streams of commerce,—to witness the deeply-laden Indiaman warped out of the docks, or to see the emigrant ship speeding with bellying sails down Blackwall Reach, watched by many weeping eyes, and the depository of many aching hearts. It would, however, spoil the enjoyment of the least-interested spectator if the veil could be lifted from the dark future ”

“ As we pass along, the self-same shadows from the statues of the gods fall upon us as darkened the white-robed priests of Isis four thousand years ago. We pass the Rosetta stone which alone retains the key of that language, in which the science and learning of the early ages of the world were inscribed. ”

“ Like the trunk of an elephant, no matter seems too minute or too gigantic, too ludicrous or too sad, to be lifted into notoriety by the giant of Printing-house Square. The partition of a thin rule suffices to separate a call for the loan of millions from the sad weak cry of the destitute gentlewoman to be allowed to slave in a nursery “for the sake of a home.” Vehement love sends its voice imploring through the world after a graceless boy, side by side with the announcement of the landing of a cargo of lively turtle, or the card of a bug-killer. ”

“ The highest kind of beauty consists in expression—it is the play of features which charms, not the mere beauty of the human mask, unimpassioned by the soul beneath. And this expression is just the thing that photography misses. When a man or woman, and especially when a woman sits to the sun for her portrait, the first thing she does is to make up a face—she can’t help it, my good reader—let the muscles of your mouth play naturally, whilst your friend is daring you to do so, if you can. ”

“ Who knows what strange things a bold adventurer might pick up who, like Schiller’s diver, would penetrate the horrid depths of the whirlpool, not for the jewelled cup of the monarch, but for the hidden living treasures nature has planted there? Doubtless, among the rusty anchors and weed-clung ribs of long-lost armadas, there nestle gigantic zoophytes and enormous starfish, which would make the fortune of the Gardens in a single season. ”

“ To survey the map, it would seem as though all the ships of the world had been attracted by our shores as by some magnetic mountain, and then shattered helplessly upon them. When we remember, however, that England is the centre of the commercial world, and that hither are attracted the mercantile navies of all nations, as well as of our own; and when we again remember that our island is surrounded with narrow seas, skirted by dangerous rocks, headlands, and sands, the wonder ceases, and we are no longer surprised, as we were when children, that in great storms sailors should seek the open sea. ”

“ A gun suddenly fired into a rookery could not cause a greater commotion than this publication of the names of dishonest tradesmen; nor does the daylight, when you lift a stone, startle ugly and loathsome things more quickly than the pencil of light, streaming through a quarter-inch lens, surprised in their naked ugliness the thousand and one illegal substances which enter more or less into every description of food that it will pay to adulterate. ”

“ Year by year Earth, the great tomb of all animate and inanimate things, is casting up fragments which speak of the mighty past—fragments which come like a resurrection to corroborate the traditions of history, and sometimes to correct or restore its lost or faded pages. ”

“ The boa and the rock-snake always swallow their prey head foremost. How is that fine neck and delicate head to make room for that bulky rabbit? thinks the spectator. Presently he sees the jaws gape, and slowly the reptile draws himself over, rather than swallows, his prey, as you draw a stocking upon your leg. The huge lump descends lower and lower beneath the speckled scales, which seem to stare with distension, and the monster coils himself up once more to digest his meal in quiet. ”